At Gekkoshot, we are veterans, or have at least been trained by a veteran of SEO. We know all of the pitfalls and how to avoid them as well as being fortunate enough to be highly trained in the SEO best practices.
Everyone’s aim and hope in SEO is to appear higher in the search engine, get their business seen and boost their bottom line. There are so many factors to be considered when it comes to SEO and one of those factors is the optimisation of images for SEO.
In the days of dial up, it was common for images to take a while to load and appear on your screen, but in this day and age with lightning fast internet connection, we now live in a time where people will not wait for a n image to load. So if your site is loading slowly, unfortunately 95% of the time, you are going to lose their custom.
What can you do to stop this from happening?
Most likely the question on the tip of your tongue if you have landed here, well I will fill you in on some of our Gekkoshot in house SEO image optimisation techniques that you can put to practice by yourself and if you are struggling at any stage talk to one of our SEO experts.
Through image optimisation you can improve your site’s overall health. This will include a reduction in your bounce rate, your SEO ranking overall, as well as your page loading time.
Image Optimization: What Exactly Is It?
Image optimisation is the practice of altering an image on a website to improve the overall performance of the site. Essentially, the sim of this process overall is for a user that is visiting your website to be the recipient of the lowest size, but highest quality image possible.
How do you reduce image size and not lose quality?
When you are going through the image optimisation process, it is important that you focus on three key areas:
- Dimensions
- Format
- Resolution
There are two techniques that prove most popular in the industry, certainly with us they are the two main methods used in office:
- Image caching
- Compressing images
Image Caching
In image caching, the image that might have previously been slow to load is stored in the browsers cache for a much faster access.
Compressing Images
When images are being compressed to go on site, essentially what is happening is that unnecessary pixel and header information is being removed from the image, information that doesn’t affect quality.
Types of Compressed image file formats:
- .jpg
- .png
- .gif
- .webp
- .aviv
Images that are optimised appear in the search results more and Google likes them more, a simple practice with great results.
1. High-Quality Images
There is nothing worse than going onto a site to be met with a pixelated image, it doesn’t really instil a great trust in a brand or service and therefore, when a potential customer lands on that page, they are fairly likely to leave and immediately add unnecessary weight to your bounce rate.
Original images of course are always better to use and in the search rankings, they will hold more of a weight, but there are also great stock imaging sites that you can go to if time is not your friend.
Top Tip: Always check the legalities of using stock images on websites, a court battle is not what you want.
2. File Names
Everyone knows that Google is reading the text on your page, but did you know that Google is also looking at the filenames of your images?
That is correct folks, the images that you are saving on your computer as “IMG_12346” are seen by Google.
If it gives you the competitive advantage over competitors, then why not get in on the practice and save your images with one of your keywords and be rewarded in the SERPS for your seemingly invisible efforts.
3. The Resizing of Images
Large image files hinder your sales! Let’s hear that again, LARGE IMAGE SIZES HINDER YOUR SALES!
If you are getting traffic to your website, keep those that you get, don’t lose them to something as trivial as an image that is taking too long to load.
REDUCE THE SIZE, NOT THE QUALITY
There are many tools that are available to use, but generally speaking, keeping the image size under 75 KB is good practice.
If you are overwhelmed with the amount of images on your site and you simply do not have the time to go through them, get in touch with us. We offer packages for image size reduction on a mass scale.
Talk to one of our SEO Experts
4. Images and Structured Data
Search engines are coming onto your website and their main goal is to understand the information that you are presenting to them.
Make this process as easy as possible to understand and navigate by providing as much information as you possibly can: Structured Data for SEO.
For more information on structured data and schema mark-ups read our blog: Schema Product Mark Up’s
5. Image Captions
Much like if you are watching a movie and you have the subtitles on, a caption under an image explains in one line what the image on screen is to users.
This can make you stand out alot and sometimes even lower your bounce rate, because if a used is about to leave and sees a punchy caption, they may be tempted into staying a little longer.
TOP TIP: Put your keywords into your captions, if they have landed on the page for a reason, it might pick up their interest at a critical point.
6. ALT Tags & SEO
We do not live in a perfect world and sometimes despite all best efforts, an image may not load and this is exactly where ALT tags come in, that and they are also amazing for your rankings as the search engine crawlers read these.
TOP TIP: Do not keyword stuff your ALT texts, no one likes that!
8. Put Your Images To The Test
It is all well and good performing all of the best practices, but if the final result is a skewed image, then all of the effort was for nothing.
The best habit that you can get into is the testing of your work.
Check your site’s analytics and this will show you how well your images are performing and will also give you handy tips on how to better time your images for search engines.
The Bottom Line To Boosting Your Bottom Line
Page speed was not always a factor in search engine ranking, but since 2010 it has picked up momentum and now, as users demand faster service, Google weights it more heavily as a ranking factor.
GOOGLE gives the people what they want!
If you are hoping for an SEO strategy that performs, then image optimisation needs to be a stellar part of it. Paying attention to images in the building of a website is the best practice as going back and redoing hard work can be demotivating and just plain irritating.
A great SEO strategy is built from the ground up. At Gekkoshot, we build our websites from the ground up with SEO in mind, every time.
We optimise every image, we fill in every ALT text, we focus on captions and most of all, through all of our SEO best practices, we secure solid and proven results, time and time again.
SEO Belfast, type it in and you will find us there: We practice what we preach.
Get in touch and talk to an SEO Expert today