If you want more people to find your business online, it’s crucial to optimize it to boost your search engine ranking. And there are many ways to optimize a website for search engines. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), websites often focus on keywords and content since they are what the search engine algorithms look through. But images can also affect your SEO ranking. So, that’s why it’s important to optimize your images for search engines.

1. Choose the Right File Image Format

There are a number of image formats, and it’s important to choose the right one that’s best optimized for search engines. This way, your images can be better crawled and indexed. Here are some of the most popular image formats and how search engines treat them:

PNG

This is an image format that supports lossless compression. It has a transparent background and supports a wide range of colors, with a maximum of 16.7 million. This format is great for photos because it’s open-source, so you can use it on several browsers and operating systems and for other applications.

JPG

This is a format that compresses your photos into a smaller size while maintaining their quality, so they’re smaller in terms of file size. But this format doesn’t support transparency, so you’d lose the background color. If you have a logo or text on your images, this format is great.

GIF

This format is mainly used for animations and image sequences. Its file size is very small since it only supports 256 colors, and it’s only meant for small photos. The reason why most search engines don’t take GIFs into account is that the images load slowly.

2. Add Alt and Title Tags to Your Images

Search engines read text within images, and there are two ways that you can use it to add it to your images. The first is by adding alt tags in the <img> tag so that any text within the image will be recognized by the search engine. The second is by using the “title” tag, which is also recognized by search engines.

Note: If you’re using WordPress, then you can use the SEO by Yoast plugin, which allows you to add alt tags in bulk to all your uploaded images.

Below is an example of the <img> tag with alt and title tags added to it:

<img src=”https://www.website.com/image.jpg” alt=”Alt tag” title=”Title tag” />

3. Compress the File Size

Reducing the file size of your images will make them load faster. And since search engines take page load speed into account, it’s better to optimize the file size of your images. There are a number of ways to reduce the file size of your images, such as:

Final Thoughts

If you want to rank higher in search engine results, then you need to make sure that your images are optimized for search engines. By optimizing your images and adding alt and title tags to them, you’ll make your images more accessible to search engines and help your website rank higher.

Improve your SEO ranking with the help of Fox Web Creations. We are a Kansas City search engine optimization agency that has worked with some leading product-based business companies. We love solving sales or products related problems and are here to help you. Get a quote now!