Friends we all know images drive huge traffic on website. So find here 7 best image optimization tips which will help you in optimizing your images more effectively. Image SEO is also part of basic SEO. It can drive more and more traffic to your website if you have optimized your images.
General Tips for Image Optimization
1. Create Unique Images (If possible)
2. Maintain Image Quality
3. Save Images for web format
SEO tips for Images
1. Image File Name
– Save and upload images with proper user friendly names. For example if you have created image of white tiger, save the image with file name white tiger. Do not name image file as 1, 2, 3 etc.
2. Use Alt Tags
– Alt tags are most important factor of images for search engine optimization. Use proper descriptive alt tags for image. Do not stuff keywords in alt tags. For example alt=”white tiger without stripes”. Remember search engine spiders can not read images without alt tags and descriptive text. So it alt tags are very important for image optimization and ranking in search engines.
3. Relevant Content
– Content is the king of SEO. Web page content should ve relevant to the image. Image SEO can not be done without proper and relevant content on page.
4. File Size and Quality
– Your image file should have good quality with optimized size. You can optimize image size in Photoshop by saving it for web only. You can also use online image size optimizer or WordPress image optimization plugins.
5. Submit Image Sitemap
– As per google and bing webmaster guidelines you can create an xml based sitemap for image files. Here is example xml sitemap code
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:image=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.domain.com/</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://www.domain.com/images/white-tiger-without-stripes.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://www.domain.com/images/white-tiger.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>
6. Share Images on Social Networking Sites
– For generating more and more traffic and optimizing images do social media networking activities. Share your images on social networking sites such as Pinterest, Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter etc.
7. Image Linking
– Use hyperlinks to image files on your website. It is not as much important but it has some score in image optimization. Use title attribute for linking image. example <a herf=”http://www.example.com/white-tiger.html” title=”white tiger”><img src=”http://www.example.com/images/white-tiger.jpg” alt=”white tiger”></a>