Optimizing Images for SEO: Best Practices

Visual content plays an important role in website promotion. High-quality images attract users' attention and improve the user experience. But few people know that properly optimized images can also improve a website’s ranking in search results.

Let's look at how to optimize images for SEO and apply best practices.

ALT tags for images

The ALT tag carries an important meaning for search engines. It describes the content of the picture with text. The robot sees ALT as normal text on the page.

When writing ALT, you must adhere to the following rules:

1. Include a keyword that describes the topic of the page
2. Create a unique and informative description for each image
3. Use highly relevant queries
4. ALT length from 120 to 160 characters

A good ALT example:

ALT="A man driving a car on a night highway. The driver looks at the road and holds the steering wheel with both hands. The photo illustrates safe driving at night."

Optimizing image files

In addition to ALT, search engines analyze the names of image files.

Optimization recommendations:

1. Include keyword in file name
2. Use hyphens instead of spaces and underscores
3. Keep titles short and clear
4. Avoid complex abbreviations and numbers

Example: safe-driving-at-night.jpg

Image size and format

Small and poorly compressed images negatively affect page loading speed.

Recommendations:

1. The optimal size is from 1000 to 2500 pixels on the larger side
2. JPG format for photographs, PNG for illustrations
3. Compression without loss of quality
4. Use services to reduce the weight of files

Uniqueness of images

All images on the site must be unique. Duplicate images can lead to problems due to over-optimization.

Search engines recommend:

1. Use only original content
2. When purchasing photo banks, choose images with unique rights
3. Do not copy pictures from other sites

Image captions

It is good practice to add captions and titles to your images. They will help to better reveal the theme and content of the picture.

It is recommended in signatures:

1. Use keywords
2. Give a detailed description of the image
3. Indicate the author of the photo

Responsive images

For optimal display on mobile devices, you need to prepare separate versions of images in small sizes.

Recommendations:

1. Create images no wider than 400 pixels for the mobile version
2. Register them using the srcset attribute
3. Specify pixel density via x attributes

Schema.org Image Markup

Another effective tool for optimizing images is Schema.org data schema markup.

Schema.org allows you to add structured data to a page's HTML to better describe its content to search engines.

For images, markup with the ImageObject type is suitable. This will help provide additional information:

1. Image description
2. Author
3. Date of creation
4. Geotag

Example of ImageObject markup for Yandex:

div itemscope itemtype="https ://schema.org/ImageObject"> img itemprop="contentUrl " src="image.jpg" alt="alt text"> "description" content="Image description" span>> "author" content= "Ivanov Ivan">