8 Things to Prepare & Optimize Your Images Become SEO Friendly
Image is part of the element of your website and also one of the ranking factors to make your website rank better. Most of the search engines are not only able to find out duplication text but also images.
To test it, simply copy the image URL and search in Google Image. You may notice Google shall return similar images. If you are copying the image from somewhere else without doing any significant modification, it will likely take it as duplication images.
This is not good and may impact your website quality score (explains in Google Panda Guidelines) which may lower down your ranking.
Contents
- #1 – Use original photos instead of buying from photo sites
- #2 – Take the photo with handphone
- #3 – Compress image into smaller size
- #4 – Geotagged your images
- #5 – Make Duplicate Images Unique
- #6 – Rename the filename of your image with keywords
- #7 – Optimize image with the ALT tag
- #8 – Add Your Name-Address-Phone (NAP)
- Key Takeaway
Here are the 8 tips to prepare the unique & optimize images.
#1 – Use original photos instead of buying from photo sites
Google search engine and visitors like to see original real photo. Visitor prefers to see raw photo rather than photos you bought from photo sites like the stock photo. If you are showing all the real product photos or work in progress photos about your service, this will proof that you are a real business.
Many websites simply copy photo somewhere else. This is important, especially you are local businesses, which real photo often get more customers and conversion rate.
#2 – Take the photo with handphone
Why do we recommend using handphone? The phone will capture the location coordinate of where you take the picture. We called this as geotagged images. Google able to read all the detail of the photos. This help to increase the location relevancy of these images and your business location. It will indirectly increase the ranking of your website and Google My Business page. Make sure you set the photo size in the right dimension and format to keep the file size small.
#3 – Compress image into smaller size
There 2 ways to make your images to become a smaller size. Reduce the dimension and convert the images into different image format.
Most phone or camera capture photo in high resolution, which results in a bigger size. Each picture may take up to a few MB of size. If you never optimize it and upload 10 images into your website, it will take a long time to load for your end-users.
As for the image format, the popular smaller size Jpeg & WebP file. You can use https://bulkresizephotos.com/en to covert images into the right dimension and compress it at 80% compression rate.
#4 – Geotagged your images
This step is needed if your photo doesn’t contain the location. GeoSetter, https://geosetter.de/en/main-en/ is a small tool to let you optimize your photo with coordinate. It is easy to use and can apply coordinate data to images by batches.
Compressing images will remove the embedded location data. Thus, you can also use this tool to add back the location data.
#5 – Make Duplicate Images Unique
For some reason, you can’t get the unique photo and need to use a picture from other sites such as a free photo from https://pixabay.com/or https://unsplash.com/. In this case, you can use the tricks below to make these images look unique (may not be 100% unique):
- Flip the image horizontally
- Add watermark text inside the image. E.g. www.adam-seo.com
- Add additional text on top of the photos.
- Combine 2 or more images.
By combine few tricks above, you usually able to generate a unique photo.
#6 – Rename the filename of your image with keywords
If you take photo directly from the camera or mobile phone, the default file is meaningless like img0001.jpg, img0002.jpg, etc.
Make sure you rename the file according to the images. E.g. don’t rename an apple image with “orange”. Google is smart enough to read and understand the actual content of each image.
Don’t stuff in same keywords in all your images. You can rename it into various variant with synonyms and long-tail keywords (longer secondary keywords).
#7 – Optimize image with the ALT tag
Next, let’s look at Image ALT tag. It specifies the text that should be displayed if the picture is not displayed. It is designed to help visually impaired people surfing the internet. The ALT tag is essential to a search engine because they assume that your picture has something to do with the content of your page. But like the visually impaired people, they actually can’t see the picture. So they will look at the ALT text as well. Make sure you include your keyword at least one in your ALT text.
Do take note and don’t:
- Using generic filenames like “1.jpg”, “pic.gif”, “image1.jpg”
- Writing extremely lengthy file names
- Stuffing keywords into alt text or copying and pasting entire sentences
#8 – Add Your Name-Address-Phone (NAP)
Firstly, the NAP of your business is one of the key factors that will help to rank your Google My Business (GMB) page in to map result. The NAP consists of your business name, address and phone number.
For example, you registered your company in yelp listing with your NAP. Google will see this as one vote on your GMB page. We also call this as a citation. The more citations you have, the more chances you will rank better in Google map result.
By using the same concept, you can add the NAP information into your images, comment property field. This will help your website & GMB ranking as well.
Key Takeaway
Once you have all the images optimized, don’t forget to upload to your Google My Business Page. It will help the GMB page ranking too.
Are you ready to revise your website photo and do further optimization?
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About the Author Adam
Adam is the founder of Adam SEO. He started his SEO journey in 2005 and officially ventured into offering an SEO consultancy service in 2011. He helped numerous companies in Malaysia and Singapore to get targeted traffic and increase their website visibility through SEO marketing.