The best way to optimize images for web - 10 simple tips you can use right now

Beware!

You need to have copyrights for publishing the photos. If they are done by somebody else, you'll need his or her permission (in writing). If you buy photos through the stock exchange or similar agency, you need to buy the right license. If there are any people on images, you'll need their permission (called modeling rights) as well.

If you intend to publish photos of children, you'll need written permission from their legal representatives (in most cases parents). And if you publish an image of the copyrighted or trademarked material (just think about a can of Coca-Cola), you need to be extra careful.

There is an ongoing debate about using original photos or stock exchange photos. In my experience, original photos are better, but stock exchange photos are not so bad either. You just need to go an extra mile and don't use the first you find (it is very likely already published in dozens of similar posts). But even if you use a very used photo, you can still beat the competition by using the next nine tips from this article.

On the other hand, an original photo needs to be done and very likely edited, what is not always an easy task. When you publish it, it is very likely somebody will pin it and this will very likely lead to two consequences:

a) A pin with your photo will beat your article in all results of search engines. When it will be repinned, other pins will beat your article too.

b) Sooner or later somebody will steal your photo and use it in his or her article without your permission. You can spend the next years filing complaints and trying to find an offender. It's a doable but not very pleasant thing to do. I worst case scenario he or she (who stole your work) will try to remove your original claiming you stole it from him (her).

My advice:

a) Don't fight Pinterest. Use it to your advantage. Make sure your Pinboard will be the first and strongest and with a bit of luck it will send you good traffic with a few costumes as well.

b) Right after publishing your original photos archive at the Wayback machine to have a proof when the material was first published. Don't fight spammers, just beat them by better content and quality links. If necessary you can still file a complaint, but don't spend too much of your precious time for that.

If you need a help on editing images, my friend occasionally makes a tutorial on Instructables:

https://www.instructables.com/member/mihgasper/

I highly recommend visiting his and other tutorials in the category of graphics.

Just one more thing: use at least one image for every published article. A rule of the thumb is using one picture after every eight to twelve lines of text but rely on your feeling.

If there is a photo of a rainbow, don't stay at standard file name given by your camera.

img8012547.jpg is no good

rainbow-photo.jpg is better

picture-of-rainbow-in-the-sky-over-waterfall.jpg is even better

With one of many free keyword research tools you should find something that will give you the edge over the competition, right?

There is an on-going debate about the usage of dashes and hyphens.

Is better

rainbow-photo.jpg

or

rainbow_photo.jpg

In my opinion, both work fine. I use dashes from times when bots had a problem of understanding the use of hyphens but it was probably solved at least a decade ago. Wikipedia use hyphens all the time and their images dominate informative articles, so go with either of them.

credit: https://colors.site123.me/blog/tag/rainbow-colors

The basic idea of alt tags comes from times when some browsers were not able to recognize pictures, so they just displayed alt tags. They were also used to inform blind users who were browsing with a help of reading machines. The alt tag is today probably the most important SEO attribute of every used image.

Many members of the SEO community just put the keywords as alt tags, but this may not be the best solution if the keywords don't match with actual images. Alt tag should describe what is in the photo, not what is the article about. The best option is, of course, using an image where the image matches keywords. Be innovative and don't hesitate to experiment.

Almost every content management system (CMS) have an option to add an image title to your graphic materials. This can be displayed as a caption on the photo or can be seen only when you hover over the image with a mouse. Sometimes (like at Wizzley) alt tag is used for image title. But officially the title tag of an image doesn't bear any SEO value.

If your title gives an additional value to your reader, absolutely use it. With better user experience and maybe more clicks on your photos, you can still expect better rankings in the results what will give you more traffic and this is the goal of SEO optimization, isn't it?

This is another questionable element of image SEO optimization puzzle. First of all, some of you probably wonder what is metadata of an image?

Simply speaking it's additional info written in all images. When you, for instance, shoot a photo, time and date of the photo are written in the file of the photo. Geolocation can be there as well. And the name of the camera, name of the owner, his company, ..., depending on the setting which may or may not influence the decisions of search bots when they find such photo in the article.

Bots can definitely read this info, but it's questionable when and how they use it or if they use it at all. In my opinion, Google tries to use every bit of gathered information if it has a reason to do that. So it won't hurt if you enter at least some basic info in the images before you upload them.

Different content management systems treat images differently, what means they are not shown the same way to the bots. Wordpress, as by far the most popular CMS has an option of adding a description for each uploaded picture where you can really go into details about your images. Majority of others don't bother with that.

In my opinion, Wordpress has a slight advantage over other blogging platforms when we are talking about positions of the images, but it's hard to say if this is thanks to the description section (not available at Wizzley, but you have a title and subtitle of an image module here).

There are so many factors which should be taken into consideration you really don't have to bother with a description if it's not available. But if it is, invest a minute and add a short description. It may help you one day.

There is a huge number of graphics formats on the web, yet we'll focus on only three which are all well-recognized by web browsers. These are GIF, JPG, and PNG.

PNG format handles with these two situations much better. Transparent files are one of its signature features. Compression doesn't affect its quality. But it has

downsides as well: there are only two available PNG formats. One is conveniently small but limited to 256 colors only. The other offers millions of colors but has much larger files, what significantly slows down page loading.

GIF is similar to PNG from SEO point of view. Just like PNG, it's best to use for logos and simple graphics, but not good for photos. It can also handle simple animations.

Conclusion: in most cases stay at JPG, for special situations consider using other two formats too.

Dimensions of an image have an important role in SEO for pictures. While monitors can display for instance 1280 x 960 pixels or 1600 x 900 or even more, this leads to huge files (every pixel carries its own information) what slows down the loading of your article. This is especially true when you have a lot of images and the majority of your users read your article on smartphones. A resolution of 640 x 512 or even 480 x 320 could serve them better.

On the other hand, you need the highest possible resolution if you are selling something that should be viewed into great details, like a T-shirt on Amazon. In this case, the most popular solution is adding a picture with lower resolution to help your article to load fast and an option to load the same image in higher resolution if somebody clicks on it.

Page load speed is a very important ranking factor and if your article doesn't come to your reader in less than three seconds, you will probably lost him or her. There is no universal recipe about image dimensions, you just need to do some experimenting.

If you imagine an entry of image in digital format it will look like a long string of numbers. Some of the numbers will be organized in patterns and this means they can be compressed in much smaller files. Let's look at a simple example:

Instead of

888888888888811111111111111

a compressed file can look like

13x8+14x1

what improves page load speed without losing any information in the file.

But some kinds of compression take a toll and too much compression will inevitably lead to a worse resolution what can negatively impact user experience and lead to lower rankings.

Just like a full article you can promote each of graphic elements in your post. Don't hesitate using them on social networks, because most of them are very graphically oriented and they can bring you very quality traffic thanks to images only. With a proper link building, you can earn high positions in search rankings (don't forget about the listing of images, where you can have several high positions for only one article).

So start learning the most efficient tactics for promoting your images on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter and enjoy the results!