When creating content for your website/blog, it is important to integrate compelling visuals to keep your visitors engaged and focused on the content. Generally speaking, you should always include at least one piece of visual aid in your writing piece.
While images can immensely help with the search engine optimization performance of the content, keep in mind that Google’s crawlers cannot decipher or understand content visually, at least not yet. That’s why bots have to rely on the textual description to understand and index images/videos.
Image optimization is often an overlooked aspect of SEO. This is exactly why you should get on it now! Optimized images can make a visual-oriented business benefit a great deal. Think about all the Google Images search queries that you might miss out on.
If you are incorporating any visual aid in your writing any time soon, take a look at these SEO practices to make sure that search engine bots can index your content better:
ALT Tag
For blind computer users, they need a screen reader in order to understand what the texts say. Similarly, search engine bots rely on ALT tags to understand what the image is about. Keep in mind: describe the image without stuffing keywords.
Image File Name
Instead of naming your image files randomly, give them a rather descriptive name. For example, IMG8857.jpg is a typical default name for photos, which will not be helpful for the Search Engine Bots. Changing the name to something like doctors-testing.jpg will have better SEO benefits.
Optimize Image Size
Resizing and downsampling photos can greatly improve search performance, especially the page loading speed. If you are using WordPress for your website, there are free plugins that can help to downsample and resize your images.
Image Caption
Utilizing the caption under the image is another opportunity to help the bots understand the context of the visual aids. One of the latest Google algorithm updates included additional improvements to how crawlers index media content.
Responsiveness
Mobile optimization has been increasingly important compared to other SEO factors in 2018. Make sure that your image doesn’t only show a fraction or out of proportion while the site is visited on a mobile device. This will help retain the visitors.