Website design for business needs clear, engaging, interesting and appealing images to add compelling visuals and help pull in organic traffic via search engine image results. But to get loads of extra traffic, it is recommended that you properly optimize your images for SEO.

First and foremost, choose the right image. Choosing excellent quality images should be your primary focus partnered with good resolution, correct aspect ratio and size appropriate and visible across various devices. Unappealing and irrelevant images will put your efforts to waste.

Whatever your business is, if you have a website, images is one of the tools for an eye-catching design, not to mention its role in your SEO efforts. Optimized images will help your website rank in local search queries and make them appear in search engine results page (SERPs) for you to get more website visitors.

 

Size of the Image File

Consider first the size of the image file. Website visitors are expecting fast-loading images or image once they click a certain web page. If images don’t load quickly, it affects the users’ experience giving them a bad impression of your website and therefore will transmit an unfavorable signal to Google. Take note that Google considers website load speed as a ranking factor. Make the right dimension when you create your image file. Compress the image if it the dimension is big, but you want the storage space to be small. Do not manipulate it. Compressing the image means the image retains a quality appearance when the file size is reduced.

 

Name of the Image File

Optimizing images for the web requires a simple but descriptive file name just like any digital file. This gives the search engines the opportunity to know your image belongs to an individual service or product and location.

 

Alternative Text (Alt Text) and Anchor Text

Let’s admit it, search engines are getting smarter with technical stuff, but they are not particularly good yet at seeing an image and identifying its content. Help describe the nature of the image by embedding “alt text” in your image. Adding a local modifier and keyword to the alternative text of an image help the search engines to understand its relevance and can better link the image with your content.

The links pointing to the image refers to the Anchor Text. It’s the web page that represents the media file of the image. Get ranked using relevant keywords found on a web page of the image file.

 

Geo-tagging and Citation in Meta Data

What is the accurate way to “tag” your image with a location? This can be achieved by adding a latitude and longitude coordinates as meta data into an image together with your business Name, Address and Phone information embedded on it.

 

Provide Google with a Sitemap

Help search engines discover all the corners of your website with a Sitemap.

Need other image tips that will help your SEO efforts? Give Drive Traffic Media a call at (949) 800-6990 today!