Image alt text is one of the most important elements of on-page SEO Optimisation. This seems small but it contributes on a huge scale when you optimize your image tags properly. In this blog post, you will learn all about image SEO and how to create alt attribute tags for pictures.
You can find a lot of images on every blog or website but have you wondered how does the search engine crawler understand what is the image alt about? This is where image alternative text comes into the picture.
Image alt text helps the search engine to understand what are the images are all about. This doesn’t only limit to the search engine but also helps the readers to understand what does the picture mean.
Image SEO is one of the best ways to drive traffic organically to any website or a blog. Because whenever a user goes to any search engine and they search content related keywords via image search. The image pops up on the search results. And when they find the content for the visual creative appealing, they click the image and enter your website. This is how you get traffic from images on search engines.
Let us now understand what is Image SEO all about?
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Image SEO meaning
Image SEO is all about optimizing the images using alt tags for search engine.
This is a process to rank your images on the image search engine results. Whenever a user types any search query, and that keyword is included within your image. Then there are high chances for your image to appear on the image search engine. It all happens due to the presence of well-researched keyword tags within the pictures.
This is one of the best ways to gain organic traffic and as well as improve your average keyword ranking position. Many experts have found this method highly resourceful. This should not be ignored and it should be included in your on-page SEO Optimisation plan.
This technique might look small for Digital marketers, content marketers and SEO experts. But the advantages and potential are huge through this SEO Optimisation technique. It will result well when you follow the step-by-step guide that will be discussed later in this blog.
Why image SEO is important?
Image SEO doesn’t limit it to itself by showing your images on top of the image search results. But sometimes even you can observe that it is being displayed on the search results as well. This helps in enhancing your user experience and also helps in better conversion rates.
There are multiple instances where images you have been found quite resourceful. And the factors are diversified based on the nature of the business. Below are some of the three such instances to understand why is image SEO important.
Helps to understand the search engine crawler better
As we all know that the search engine crawler is an AI robot. These are the crawlers that go to each content, images as well as your videos. And when they keep on crawling through every content on the web, they encounter images and visual files. But they do not understand what is it all about. So when you optimize the image using the alternative tags and text for the picture, only then the search engine crawler understands the image.
In this technique, the image starts to appear on the search engine whenever you optimize it with the right keywords. It is one of the best ways to get organic traffic from search engines as the potential is huge.
Helps your readers
The second use case would be in terms of the front-end user interface. Whenever a user is going across your blog, and they find that the image is broken. Then automatically the image alt text appears on the particular section. This will help to understand what was the missing section all about.
You need to be prepared for all scenarios. This is the best way for you to reduce the bounce rate whenever the user encounters a problem. And it also helps in engaging with your target audience better with image captions.
Helps visually impaired people
Visually impaired people will be using the text-to-speech function. So whenever they scroll any images on the content, it reads out loud what the images are all about. This mainly happens because of the alt text. This is how image alternative text plays an important role in helping visually impaired people.
One of the most important features that are not realized by many. It not only contributes on a larger scale for SEO purposes but considering the humanitarian grounds. This technique is a much-required process in on-page SEO Optimisation.
Why do we need to include images in our blog posts or website?
This purely depends on the type of content or the business services that you are providing for your audience. Let’s assume that your business is into food services. Then it is obvious that without using any images on your website, this doesn’t make sense for the audience. Here the more you represent images on your webpage, the more it helps in the conversion process.
Now let us consider the example of blog posts. Whenever you try to explain a particular subject to your audience, you don’t use any graphs for charts. It will be very hard for your audience to understand the concept and the User experience is affected. This can increase the bounce rate which eventually keyword ranking position also drops.
As the scenarios where images play an important part in terms of audience engagement. It will be ideal for you to use images to represent the content better.
The above instances are related to the user’s point of view. Now let us learn the benefits of using images for search engine crawlers.
As per the recent search trends, whenever you include images or infographics within your blog post. Search engine crawler starts to give importance to those blog posts over your competitors.
This technique is one of the best ways to help your readers as well as the search engine crawler. When you get better engagement from users, you start to observe better growth in traffic.
What is an alt tag in SEO?
You might have come across this term popularly whenever you are reading about on-page SEO. Alt tags are an HTML tag embedded for an image to help the search engine crawler understand it better.
Alt tag in SEO means the description that you are giving for an image with the help of an HTML tag.
You can commonly find HTML tags on every web page.
What is alt text in SEO?
This is another popular keyword term whenever you are optimizing images for SEO.
Alt text is known as alternative text. The text that you give for the images helps the images get more accessible for readers and search engines.
This is similar to the alt tag method. Both functions the same.
The sole purpose of alt text and alt tag was to help people who are visually impaired. But now the use cases have been diversified for other aspects of SEO.
How does an image rank on the search engine?
There are many ways in which the image ranks on search engine. But we will be shortlisting the top elements that help a picture to rank.
Because the images are crawlable
This is one of the crucial steps that you need to undertake before optimizing an image for a blog or a website. You need to check whether the images are crawlable, indexable and readable.
You can simply do it by checking the robots.txt and see whether if the content is getting blocked. You can find the robots.txt file in your file manager. Once when you check that there is no blocking element, you need to proceed by checking its tags. This is one of the most important aspects you need to do before submitting images for indexing.
You can check the XML sitemap, whether they are updated with all the recent content with images. If it is not updated, you can submit the sitemap in the search console for re-indexing. If you find that you use a lot of images on your website or blog, then it is better to use a dedicated XML sitemap only for the images. This generally happens for a large E-commerce website where they have tons of products images.
After both the process are done, you need to check whether the images have been indexed or not. Give some time for the search engine crawler to go across your images to index them for image search results.
Page relevancy with the image
This is another important step that you need to undertake before optimizing an image for SEO. You can insert alt text with SEO-focused terms only if the page is relevant to the image. Failing to do this, you’ll not be able to see the results as it can not engage your customers.
Many marketers forget this method of optimizing alt tags. Because the page relevancy is a crucial element for the image to be optimized. When you can develop content that is related to the image alt text, then you will start to receive better results from the search engine.
Let’s take the example of your blog talking about product review and the product is a television. You need to insert images of the television products within the blog post. And for image alt tags, you can insert television-related keywords. This is how you can come up with optimizing images for page relevancy.
With the help of image captions
You can find this feature in WordPress and other popular CMS platforms. Whenever you insert the image on a blog post, you can find a field where you can enter the caption. This often reflects on the front end as well as backend also.
Unlike the image alt, the image captions her directly portrayed in front of the screen. This is one of the better ways to engage your users with the help of image captions.
This also helps the search engine crawler to understand better what the image is all about. Captions can be a quote or popular saying that engages your readers.
With the help of image description
Just putting the title and giving the image alt text is not enough. Any search engine crawler would appreciate it if the image has been embedded with the proper description. As it can build more authority for the image to be relevant on the search engine.
This feature you can popularly find in the leading CMS platforms. You just need to insert a description in order to explain what is the image all about. This is one of the most popular techniques which is hardly noticed by marketers.
When you can provide the right context using the image description, this can easily benefit your image to get more relevant. Ensure that you do not overstuff with keywords and descriptions so that your image importance is decreased.
Analyze the image format and size
This is another crucial element while optimizing pictures for SEO purposes. Because you need to ensure that the image follows all the resolution guidelines set by your website or blog. Smaller the size of the image, the better search relevancy it gets.
Always ensure that you use the proper format of images like JPG or PNG or SVG format. These are some of the popular image formats that you can use for your blog posts for web pages.
The next thing comes in size optimisation. Ensure that all your images are under 100kb. This will give a better scope in terms of your images to rank on the image search results.
This even helps in getting the image preview for your blog post whenever it gets featured on the snippet. It will be one of the best ways to receive better CTRs and growth in traffic.
By maintaining proper length
Always ensure that whether it can be the image title, alternative text for an image, or even the description that you give. Always follow that it should be maintaining proper descriptive length.
For an image alt text, this can be up to 60 characters count. This applies the same rule for the image title tag.
If we talk about the limit for image description, this can be limited up to 160 characters. I know that this is sounding familiar because it closely relates to the page title and meta description. The same rule is applicable for image SEO also.
When you follow the proper length of the description, there are chances for your images to get noticed by the search crawler.
How to optimize images for SEO?
The search engine crawler understands only the generic kind of figures within the image. This can be a car, rainbow, or water, and so on. But the problem with the search engine crawlers is, they don’t understand the complexity of the images.
This is where you need to optimize images for SEO.
Here are the best following ways that you can optimize images for SEO purposes. Ensure that you follow this step-by-step guide correctly so that you can get efficient results.
1. Use a proper image title tag
This is one of the preliminary steps in which you need to take to proceed with optimizing pictures for SEO purposes.
The image title tag is basically your file name. When you use the right keyword terms within the file name of your images, your CMS automatically captures that file name as the image title.
So ensure that you always use the proper image title tag before uploading the media file.
2. Utilise descriptive alternative text
As we discussed earlier that, if you use descriptive alt text for images, it should be within 60 characters. This will help the search engine crawler to understand what is the image all about. And you will not face any issues faced while it is displayed on the front end.
Proper alternative text is the key to receive better results. See-through that the alt text that you provide should be topic relevant as well as content relevant. When both these factors satisfy, the search crawler gives more weightage to your images.
This even helps visually impaired people. As the alt text is read out loud.
With the proper descriptive alt, the readers can also get to know better in the case when the image breaks.
3. Use image description and Caption
Image description acts as a meta description. Try to optimize the images with the proper description that is limited to under 160 characters for better search relevancy.
When you use the proper image description, this gives an additional boost for crawlers to understand better. You can take the help with the related keywords search terms that are associated with your blog. And when you use the related keywords, you can easily come up with a description that is simple and engaging enough for the readers.
The caption is another way to get the attention of your audience. This usually reflects on the front end as well as the backend also. It is one of the most creative ways to promote the image on a blog post.
4. Use proper image format
Usually, the image guidelines are purely dependent on the image resolution supported by your website or blog. When you upload an image, ensure that it meets all the image dimensions guidelines.
When the image dimensions are followed across your website, then it is easy for images to rank.
If you are using an oversized image, it will not get indexed properly. This even becomes a constraint for the browser to display the images for readers. When you use proper resolution images, you will get better results.
5. Opt for a CDN
CDN is popularly known as a content delivery network. This helps to load your images quickly on any blog post or web page.
CDN is basically an external server that is connected with your website to host the images. When the majority of the size is dropped from the blog post, your page starts to load quicker.
When the CDN hosts image, this gives a better potential for your images to get indexed better. The CDNs are popularly used for E-Commerce websites as well as blogs that have a lot of images.
If you are using a WordPress, Shopify for Magento platform, then it is very easy for you to use this CDN.
6. Optimise the image size
Using the right image size helped a lot for the crawler to display it better on the image search results. When you optimize the image size correctly, your web pages also tend to load faster. And also benefits images to appear higher on search results.
There are many image Optimisation tools that you can opt for. If you are using WordPress, there are Optimole, WpfastestCache, and so on. There is a similar kind of integrations for Shopify and Magento platforms also.
If you use none of the platforms from above, you can even try to optimize it manually. There are many apps and software that you can install to reduce the image size. If you do not wish to install the software application, you can do it from an online source also. To name a few Compressjpeg, Resizepixel and many others.
7. Use schema markup
If your blog post or webpage has the following elements then it is very easy to use the schema markup. Elements like recipes, products, and videos. If you have such elements, you can use the snippet code to demonstrate them better.
Schema markup is used for Blog posts or web pages to get featured on top of search results. The preview that you witness on the search result is because of the proper utilization of Schema markup.
It is one of the most engaging ways to receive better CTR and also get significant traffic growth. Before you proceed with this, check the images if they are discoverable and indexed.
How to insert image alt text?
Here are some of the ways where you can insert images alt text.
Considering the popular platform examples of WordPress, Shopify, and Magento.
If your website platform is out of the list, you can even do it by adding a custom HTML tag manually.
How to insert image alt text on WordPress?
WordPress is one of the most popular CMS platforms that you find globally. Because of Its easy functionality and features that even a non-developer can work on.
When you log in to your WordPress website.
On your left-hand side, you can observe the list of options. You need to click media where you can see all kinds of media files like documents, images and videos.
So select any image, and when you open that, on the right-hand side you can see the alternative text. The alternative text is situated below the image title. This is where you can add alternative text for the image. You can even find other fields such as caption, image description, and so on.
In the same way, you can replicate the steps for other media files.
How to insert alt text for images in the Magento platform?
The process is very easy to insert alt text for images in Magento websites.
Locate the catalog section from the Magento dashboard. Under the catalog, you can find the products option.
Under the products option, there is a list of media files which are images and videos.
Click any file to add the relevant alt text for an image.
How to insert alt text for images in Shopify websites?
Shopify is one of the popular e-commerce website platforms. As this website is heavily dependent on the products, they have a good scope of opportunities to insert the description part as well.
There are two ways to add image alt text. One way is adding image alt text for the product and the other is for Website media files.
For products:
Find the products option, and then you need to click all products.
When you go to your product listing section. Select and edit every individual product and check its media details. In this way, you can add alt text for img on Shopify websites.
For Website images:
Find the option labeled as an online store, then you need to click the themes option. Later you will be able to find customize button.
When you click the customize button, you will find the list of media items on your left-hand side. Then you can individually select each block to add the relevant alt text.
To sum it up
Image SEO is one of the best ways to receive organic traffic for any blog or website. This is highly fruitful when you do it in the right way. Because this can create huge scope of opportunities starting from enhancing audience experience to the growth of traffic. Image SEO has huge potential that no marketer should miss.
If your website is about photography, real estate, e-commerce, and food. Images play a key role in these verticals. As the visual elements are everything for the readers. When you properly optimize the images using alt text, then you can notice the significant impact on brand visibility.
Image SEO is completely evolving and growing rapidly. When you are able to follow the guidelines and strategies, there is no stopping for your website to achieve better growth.
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