Editorial Staff
While images are essential in making your post more attractive and engaging for the website visitors, optimizing images are essential in term of search engine optimization.
Do you still remember in chapter 8 you’ve learnt that image packs are one of the SERP features?
Benefits of Optimized Images in SEO
Having attractive and optimized images in your site is far more beneficial than just a stylish purpose.
Here’s what you can get if you have optimized images in your post:
1. Get into #1 Ranking in the Google Image SERP
According to the research, around 81% pictures in Google image SERP are not being optimized.
It seems like most of the webmaster forgotten to optimize their image while focusing too much on ranking on the search result.
This means that this is a huge opportunity for you to rank your picture in the Google image SERP!
While ranking your blog post in the text-based SERP can be a lot more challenging, why not aiming for #1 in the image SERP, right?
2. Get Bonus Traffic
If your image managed to rank in the image SERP, don’t be surprised to receive some additional traffic.
Based on our analysis on one of our #1 ranking image in image SERP, we received 11% additional traffic of that specific post coming from the image clicks.
3. Get More Websites Linking to You
Creating a new image requires a lot of work.
This explains why most of the blog sites prefer to just take the image from the SERP and link to the other website, instead of creating a new image by themselves.
Around 19% of one of our site’s backlink are coming naturally from our self-created images.
You never know that one day, you received a backlink from a super authority sites simply by linking to your images. And that free backlink from a super authority site has value of a thousand dollar!
In fact, we experienced that many times in one of our site.
4. It Help Boost Your Text-Based SERP
If now you’re struggling to rank 1 in the text-based SERP, having a single optimized image can have a huge impact.
Let me tell you one of our real case:
In one of our sites, we were aiming for #1 ranking on a specific keyword.
At first, we were struggling to get into the #1 ranking since it was dominated by the giant news site and huge company sites.
At that time we only managed to get the #8 position in the text-based SERP. However, it turns out that our image attached to that post managed to rank #1 in the image SERP for the same keyword.
We were getting a constant positive engagement from that #1 ranking in image SERP such as clicks, share, and even organic backlinks.
Within few months, we managed to get #1 ranking in the text-based SERP as the result of our images optimization!
Images Optimization Practices
Now you’ve seen the incredible impact of getting #1 in image SERP.
However, the process is not just by simply add the picture inside your post and hope the magic will appear.
It requires some work for you to do that we called as “Images optimization”.
Now, we’re going to show you exactly the secrets how we optimized our images and managed to get #1 ranking in image SERP, step-by step!
1. Create a Top Quality Image
If you want other sites to link to your image, you should provide a useful and top quality image that make them can’t resist to link to yours.
You can’t just create a simple low quality image and hoping any site to link to you.
So, what are those images type that sites typically want to link?
Infographics
Creating infographics require you to do some research and analysis on the data, and present them in the attractive image form.
According to the research, high quality infographics are 30 times more likely to be read than the text articles.
This means, it will increase the visitor’s time duration in your sites and reduce the bounce rate.
Websites are also more likely to link to the infographic images since they find it useful for their readers.
Here is the example of high quality infographic image:
High-Quality Illustration Images
If your blog post don’t cover any infographic data, then a high-quality illustration image can be the alternative.
Here is the example of high quality illustration image:
2. Upload a Fresh & Original Image
Google loves new and fresh information and happily provide them to their users.
If they find the new image that you uploaded has no different or has been uploaded before to the internet, chance are your images will never rank in the SERP.
Not only text, Google also has their system to detect a duplicate image that has been uploaded to the internet before.
3. Choose The Right Format
There are various of image formats out there, but we recommend JPEG/JPG for SEO purpose.
PNG: High quality, large size.
JPEG: Adjustable quality, lower size.
4. Rename The File Name to Your Keyword
Google clearly stated that they extract information of an image from content of the page, image captions, image title, and file names.
For example, if you upload a puppy image, it is better to rename the file into new-puppy.jpg than IMG00051.jpg.
This will help to give a signal to Google to understand what is your image about.
5. Compress Images
The bigger the size of an image that added to your website page will result in slower the site to load.
Meanwhile, Google like fast-loading website.
The faster your site load, the better chance your page will rank well in the SERP. You will learn more in details about website speed in the future lesson (Off-Page SEO).
Hence, if you want your site to load faster, compress your image size to more and less 100 KB before adding to your site.
100 KB is the benchmark size where you can have the smallest size at the best quality.
In here, you need to have your own adjustment of calculation. But here is what we recommend:
- Do not compress the images too small as it will result the image to be blurred and not cleared. You definitely don’t want to have a blurred image in your site since it will give a bad impression for your readers.
- If the image is mean to be small for a purpose, you can compress much lower. Still, you need to check if the image quality is still good after you compress.
- If the image consists of small details (usually in the infographics) that you want your reader to pay attention, compress it around 100 to 150 KB.
6. Use Relevant Alt Text
Alt text is a HTML attribute that describes an image.
Here is the example of an alt text from one of the picture by Pipcorn Pipsnack LLC:
From the above picture, you can see that the alt is accurately describe the picture, which is “Popcorn Family Pack Popocorn pipsnacks LLC”.
Basically, the alt text helps the search engine to give ideas to the search engine on what is your picture about.
7. Make it Responsive Format
Responsive image format means you’ll optimizing your image to adjust on any devices.
For example, your picture may look clear in the computer, but when it comes to mobile devices, it could be too small.
In order to turn your image into responsive format, you can adjust this code in your HTML:
<img src=”nature.jpg” alt=”Nature” class=”responsive”>
Or this code to your CSS:
.responsive {
 width: 100%;
 height: auto;
}
Let’s proceed to the next lesson!
