Tips for optimising images for search engines and how you can improve your website’s visibility by optimising image size, alt text, and file names.
Ieva Treiliha
When your target audience searches for your products or services on Google, it is crucial that your website is optimised to achieve strong rankings in the organic search results. The technical term for this is search engine optimisation, or SEO.
A growing trend is that more and more people are discovering services and products through the images that appear in search results, and you want your images to be among them.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but only if it is actually seen. That is why it is not only important that your site is optimised with the right keywords in your URLs, titles, headings, text, and paths – your images must also be optimised for search engines. Images can influence your rankings in search engines, so this is essential.
In this blog post, I will explain how to ensure your images are optimised for search engines, so they will rank higher and hopefully also appear directly in the organic search results.
Below you can see an example where images are shown directly in the organic search results for the keyword “blue babygrow”.
Google likes plenty of unique text, but Google likes it even more if you have images that match your text. Images make your products or services more tangible for your audience, and the same applies for search engines.
Here are some steps you can take to optimise your images for search engines and keep Google happy:
When it comes to search engine optimisation, it is important to ensure your website loads quickly. Your images play a significant role here. That is why you should scale down your product or service images. In fact, image size should be reduced as much as possible without compromising quality.
For example, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights to analyse your website’s load time and see which images could benefit from being reduced.
You can try Google PageSpeed here.
If you have images on your website that are 3 MB or more, it can negatively affect your website’s ranking.
A general rule of thumb is that images should be no smaller than 100 x 100 pixels and no larger than 1200 x 1200 pixels. You can also link to a larger image via a thumbnail.
To scale down your images, you can use https://kraken.io/, which is an excellent tool for this purpose.
Google is already rolling out its new mobile first indexing, and you are probably already aware that your website needs to be responsive to adapt to different screen sizes. If your images are not responsive, it is important to implement a srcset attribute. This attribute ensures several versions of the same image are available, so the image matches the user’s device regardless of screen size.
Another simple way to start optimising your images for search engines is to consider their file names. The file name should contain, and ideally start with, your keyword. The name should also describe what is in the image.
Image files are often named IMG23535.jpg or similar. This should be renamed so that search engines can identify what is in the image. When renaming your images, separate the words with hyphens, e.g. blue-babygrow.jpg. The hyphen between words tells Google to read them as separate words. Sometimes, images are named blue_babygrow.jpg – but underscores make Google read the words as one, so it interprets the file name incorrectly.
Search engines are smart enough to read ae as æ, aa as å, and oe as ø, but you should never use capital letters or special characters in your image file names.
The ALT text is the small text that appears when you hover your mouse over an image. It is intended to help visually impaired users understand what is in the image. However, the ALT text is also used for search engine optimisation, as it tells the search engine what the image shows.
If you have text above or below your images, it is important to embed your keywords in that text. This has a positive effect on the image’s visibility in search engines. Google reads the text around an image as an indicator of what the image contains.
This kind of text is called captions, and visitors who view a product or read an article often see image captions.
Schema Markup, or semantic markup, is used to tell search engines what your data means, not just what it says. By using semantic markup, you provide search engines with more structured data, giving them a better understanding of your website content. This helps search engines improve the quality of their search results.
For example, take the word Polo. Is it a car, a clothing item, or a mint? With semantic markup, you help search engines by specifying, for instance, that Polo is a car on your website.
You can use Schema.org, a collaboration between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, where you can find many examples of how to structure your data. Once you have marked up your data, you can test it using Google’s testing tool.
Google has also developed its own tool to generate structured data, called Google Markup Helper. You can view your own website while adding your markup. This is a user-friendly tool that works well.
As mentioned earlier, a picture is worth a thousand words, but it cannot stand alone. If you ensure that the content on your landing pages is optimised for one keyword per page, so that the URL, heading, text, and image all match, this creates the perfect combination to highlight your products or services in the organic search results.
At a time when major stock photo services are becoming even bigger, it has never been more popular to buy and sell images and videos. But it is a very good idea to think carefully before using images or videos from an external supplier. This is especially important if you run a webshop or website where images are a significant factor for your sales. Duplicate content penalties do apply to images, just as they do to text.
Google is, as we know, by far the most widely used search engine. This is because Google manages to deliver the most relevant results when users search for information, products, and images. If Google showed the same image 10 times, users would likely have a negative experience. Google has also indicated that they would rather show incorrect images unrelated to a search than show the same image more than twice in the entire Google Images search results.
If, for example, you have a webshop full of supplier images, you do not necessarily have to start taking all your own photos.
Ovenstående eksempel fremviser samme produkt, men i to forskellige varianter. I Googles øjne er de to billeder ikke identiske, og dermed er der ingen risiko for problemer med dublicate content. Man behøver derfor ikke at skulle til at tage helt nye billeder for at gøre et billede unikt, da det er nok at ændre pixelopbygningen i forhold til originalen. Du kan bl.a. arbejde med at skifte baggrundsfarve, skifte baggrundsbillede, tilføje tekst og meget mere.
Der skal ikke være nogen tvivl om, at ovenstående metoder ikke er ligeså gode, som hvis der tages helt nye produktbilleder. Det er måske kun et spørgsmål om tid, inden Google vil opdatere algoritmen ift. billedsøgninger. Google arbejder intensivt med Object Detecting – genkendelse af objekter i billeder. Så Google dermed bedre kan afkode, hvad der er på et billede. Og mon ikke de i samme anledning bliver bedre til at vurdere, om et billede er 100% unikt, eller om der er blevet arbejdet med et billede, så pixelopbygningen blot er anderledes.
Derfor er det en god idé at overveje, om man allerede nu skal investere i produktion af egne billeder, så man er på forkant med Googles opdateringer (og ens konkurrenter). Ændring af pixelopbygning er en metode, der virker i dag, men om det gør det i fremtiden, er svært at sige.
At WeMarket, we offer businesses a benchmark report that compares their marketing efforts with their key competitors. You decide which competitors we should compare against.
We specialise in selling physical goods online and growing webshops – and now you can benefit from this expertise, even if you’re not already a client.
It’s completely free.
