Seeing is believing which makes images one of the most important components of any good landing page or blog post. Images help bring any piece of content to life and increase a page’s SEO value. Images help visitors understand what content is about more easily and help keep them on your site for longer so they should be a big part of any SEO content strategy.
Optimize Images
There are a few things you should keep in mind when you’re finding images to use with organic SEO content to make sure they’re bringing value to a page.
Image File Size Matters
PageSpeed is an important component of how Google ranks a page and images often make up for a large percentage of data loaded from any page. Making sure your images are sized appropriately for the location they will be displayed and are compressed for the web is important. Some WordPress sites can also be configured to display images in the webp format which will reduce file size even more.
The PageSpeed Insights tool can be used to determine how much time images are taking to load on your site and identify opportunities where file size can be reduced.
Use Keywords in Filenames
Saving files with important keywords in the filename is a good way to ensure search engine bots know what an image is about. Adding important search terms at the beginning of a filename with dashes between words is a good image SEO practice. Using terms relevant to the post the image will be added to, like seo-optimize-images.jpg, will also help increase the SEO value of a page.
Add Alt Tags
Alt tags give you another place to add keywords that should be associated with a particular image. The text added to an alt tag for an image will display if the image can’t be displayed for any reason. Alt text is intended to improve a site’s accessibility and can also be used to add variations of keywords to an image.
Images in Structured Data
Images are a component that can be added to structured data for a page to improve its appearance on search engine result pages. Setting a featured image for a page or post on a WordPress site will make the image eligible to show with a listing for the page on search engine results pages.
Images can help draw more attention to a search listing and make it more attractive so it’s a good idea to set a featured image even if it doesn’t show every time the listing is displayed.
High-Quality Content
Almost any piece of high-quality content will include images to reinforce its message. Images play a big part in how a site looks and can be used to build your brand. Finding the best possible images for your site and optimizing them with user experience in mind is an important step of the SEO process.