What does optimizing for image SEO mean?
If you’re in the business world, you may have heard at least once about SEO and how important it is for businesses. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s the process of making your website better for search engines so more people visit it.
Many ranking factors measure how valuable a website is to make it rank better on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), and of course, there are other factors or practices that affect your website’s SEO.
When it comes to websites, you must think about two things first:
- That search engines understands your website data, content, and purpose
- And second, that your website engages the average user
The trick here is to keep a balance.
Images and videos can affect your website’s SEO because it affects a user’s experience, leading to improved conversions and reputation for your business. Let’s explore how to use these resources properly in order to improve users’ experience, and how to optimize for image SEO.
How Images and Video Work on Your Site
Images and videos are very popular because they are great for engagement. They can be a search result, they can keep a visitor on the page longer, and they can improve conversions when you’re selling a product.
But that’s only from the users’ perspective. It is necessary to understand that images and videos are supposed to be appealing to search engines as well, which is why image SEO matters. Here are three things to think about when including images or videos on a website.
Search engines don’t understand images and videos without help
When a bot “crawls” your website, it is reading all the content on your site to understand the topic and purpose of your business. For any bot, whether it’s a Google bot or Bing bot, it is hard to understand what images and videos are about — they need data for that.
For this reason, it is essential to include something called alt text to make these non-text elements SEO-friendly. Alt text are descriptions that go in the code to let bots know what an image is about, or a tag within the code that consolidates what the video is about.
Images and Videos may affect your page speed
Although images and videos are really engaging because they improve a website’s appearance and encourage users’ interaction. However, having too many images or long videos increases the loading time.
How can you confirm your website is going through a page speed issue? Test it. There are tools like page speed insights and GTMetrix that can show you how your website it’s performing in terms of responsiveness or page speed.
To avoid these non-text elements affecting your page speed, certain optimizations must be done to reduce their sizes. Fortunately, many easy-to-use plugins can help you do it, like ewww image optimizer that works for WordPress websites.
Images or Videos should be responsive so they don’t affect users’ experience and ranking
Don’t you hate when you’re navigating from a mobile device and a website doesn’t adjust to your screen? Or when an image or a video you play is cut? One of the factors that measure if a website is worth ranking over others is its mobile-friendliness.
Websites that aren’t responsive, which means they aren’t mobile-friendly, won’t rank in a good position and won’t deliver a good users’ experience. If you would like to test if your website is mobile-friendly, you can Google “page mobile friendly test” and run the test.
Considering these points when creating a good UX strategy will significantly impact your reputation, not only from search engines’ perspective but also from the users’ perspective.
The SEO Tool You Need
SEO is a complex but important aspect of your business’ success, and you can’t be expected to understand all of its ins and outs. You need the right tools to improve your website easily and bring in more customers.
With Alpha SEO, you can get full-service, custom SEO for your site, along with the help of digital marketing experts, tracking, reporting, and more. Manage your website and more from one place today.
At Financbase, we are a Digital Marketing Agency that helps local businesses reach their goals with advanced and convenient online marketing tools. We are the experts you want to have by your side when it comes to your website.
