Images have usually been considered a descriptive and aesthetic element of the first order on a web page, especially for their ability to attract the user’s attention and make a good first impression.
However, for many digital marketing professionals, they are also a way to improve important traffic that must also be taken care of from an SEO point of view.
Many times great improvements can be achieved simply by spending a little time to take care of some elements of the SEO that we publish. Here we analyze some actions that can be of help.
Use the right image
It may seem like a no-brainer, but if we surf the internet regularly we will see that most of the time this precept is not met, either due to carelessness or because graphic material is lacking.
The ideal would be to be able to publish material created especially for the occasion, be it photographs, infographics, or photomontages.
If you do not have the means, it may be a good idea to use a graphic designer or a professional photographer. Or you can get more than 5k free images from the Bouns Design website.
Suitable File Formats
When it comes to the web, there are three, JPEG, GIG, and PNG. All three have advantages and disadvantages, so we must choose one of these formats based on our needs in terms of parameters such as resolution, color palette, compression, browser compatibility, transparency, and animation elements.
File name optimization
The image must have the correct name. When images taken from the memory card of a mobile phone or a camera are inserted, they are identified with a code, which, although it is useful for cataloging, says nothing to search engines that can know nothing about the content of the image.
Look for a title that fits the image and if you can go further, use a tool such as Google Trends or Ahrefs to choose the keywords that are experiencing a greater number of searches in recent times.
Alt tags
They are a classic of SEO and web accessibility for the visually impaired, but they are often forgotten in many web pages, something that we can see simply by consulting the HTML view of any page.
The “alt” tag is displayed when for some reason the High Contrast Images cannot be loaded (slow connection, the image is hosted on an external server with problems), so it is an SEO positioning factor that informs the search engine of the image content. It must refer to the theme of the image and the keyword for which we want to position.
Caption tags
They are subtitles or legends that are displayed below the image. This is a great place to add messages that complement the description of the image and relate it to the text.
Some studies claim that they improve ecommerce conversions and reduce the bounce rate.
Image sitemaps
They are useful when we manage a website with a large number of images and multimedia content. Google image sitemaps are extensions that provide the search engine with the necessary and detailed information to know what the images are on our site.
This allows Google to index more and better images, especially those that could be hidden behind a Javascript code.