At this point, no one doubts that working on the positioning of our website is important if we want our target customer to visit it. Working on an SEO strategy is essential for this and it can be done through content, but also through images. How? Let’s see it below.
SEO positioning has a long way to go
Positioning a website, a blog, or e-commerce is not an easy task at all. It requires work, perseverance, technical knowledge, a defined strategy, analysis… But it also requires patience and empathy.
These last two virtues are very important for two reasons: the first of them is patience because it is a long work in which we will sow fruits that we will not reap immediately. This is not so: SEO positioning is something that is worked day by day, with perseverance and with a lot of “trial – trial – error”.
Secondly, empathy, because, although there are more and more tools that help us to find out where the search trends are going (essential to be found), there is also an important part that consists of intuiting what these trends will be.
In many cases, anticipating can mean that we end up positioning our content and, therefore, our website, much earlier. But there is also an aspect that is not always taken into account, although there is no manual that does not emphasize it: the optimization of images for SEO.
The Internet user consumes more and more visual content. The text is very important since it searches through keywords. However, once he launches the search… Ta-da! He goes directly to the “images” option.
I’m sure you understand where we’re going, right? This is exactly where your content may not have been positioned, but your image has. Precisely because not everyone takes this into account, it is much easier to appear in this way than in the generic search results.
In these cases, the search engine does its research among the thousands of images on the network, which have been named before being uploaded with the keywords in question. Seems obvious, doesn’t it?
Well, this is something that many companies, too many, do not stop to think about when uploading their images. And that is why it is an opportunity for those that do take care of this aspect before publishing the images that accompany their posts.
Once this is known, let’s see what are the keys to optimizing the images so that search engines find them. This is positive, both for them to be found, redundancy aside, and for the loading times of the web to be appropriate. Let’s take a closer look.
Keys to optimizing your images
As we were saying, we have heard so much about the importance of optimizing content that we have focused only on text. Meanwhile, images have been left out of this SEO positioning work, when it is just as important, if not more important.
Therefore, it is important that we begin to incorporate a series of good practices when publishing the images on our website, as well as those that accompany our blog posts.
Before moving on to optimization, it is important to remember the characteristics that images must have on the site of an online store. It is useless to optimize an image if it does not have the necessary parameters to attract the attention of customers.
Quality: The image must give a good impression of the product. This implies that you must have photographs with a background that highlights the product, that is original, with good resolution, and taken with adequate lighting. Don’t worry about the budget, you don’t need a professional camera or to be an expert in photography.
Visible product features and elements: Photos that do not allow you to clearly see the main features of the product are useless. Remember that photographs accompany the description, so these should be useful to check that the information provided matches.
Show different angles: This is not a strict rule, but it is an element that will help you provide more details about the quality of your product.
Homogeneity: Care must be taken with the proportions used in the products so that they are not all coherent and there is an order to be seen.
In the case of blogs, you need quality images that can perfectly explain what you are trying to say in the text. Otherwise, you will only be adding meaningless images that search engines will not take into account.
Put an alt attribute when uploading the image
This is another thing that often goes unnoticed and that, in a hurry, people forget to do. It is about adding alt attributes when uploading the photo. These should always include keywords that interest us because this way our website will be better positioned. In other words, search engines do not evaluate images, so the Alt Text is the HTML tag that will help them find the image. In this alternative text, you should try to be descriptive, without filling it with a lot of text (preferably no more than 5 words).
As we have already said, in the Alt text you must place the keywords you have been working on and for which you are interested in positioning yourself, and do not forget that they must be related to the image, since we are looking for them to describe it.
The URL of the page
The harmony between URLs and images is also important. This is especially important on pages where there are several images uploaded, such as those that include photo galleries.
This is because the Google robot when it launches a search and accesses a page focuses on the two or three images it considers most relevant to a topic. That is why when we search for photos in Google Images we see the photos that best fit the content of the page itself.
Take care of the image size
This is another common mistake when uploading photos. While it is true that most of the pages, especially if they are made with WordPress, resize to fit the hole of the photo, this requires a series of internal actions that slow down the loading process of this photo.
In addition, the image may be showing some part that we do not want to be seen, or even show it pixelated. Therefore, it is best to upload it already edited in the usual image formats, with 16:9 or 4:3 proportions.
Image size
This is also related to the above. First of all, uploading a photo with a lot of weight will slow down the loading times. And this is something that Google (and nobody) likes because we are not going to waste time waiting for the page to decide to display its content.
Therefore, before uploading an image to your website, take your time to reduce its weight. They don’t have to be small, but you should keep in mind that the recommended size for the web is about 72 pixels per inch. Heavy photos are better for printing.
As for formats, JPEG is ideal for search engines. Most prefer this format because it offers good-quality files that are even smaller. In the case of PNG, it is more advisable for flat images or images with transparency, such as your logo.