6 Tips to Improve Image SEO in WordPress

Image SEO is the one of important part to boost SEO in your page or post. You can do it easily. Select some relevant images and name them correctly. Then fill in the necessary fields to get your images to work. If you wanna know more about image SEO, this article for you. We are gonna discus about some easy tips to improve image SEO in WordPress.

Why Image SEO is needed?

Image SEO is one of main part to boot SEO and improve site’s organic traffic. If you do not use Image SEO, you are missing a key part of your marketing strategies. Because it gives a chance to build brand awareness and get a higher rank in search results.

Image SEO also improve your post’s readability and it helps to breaking up your text into sections. They helps to search engine to get better understanding about post content. Another important thing is, many people visit websites that have images and videos in their content more than websites that only have text.

Image SEO Improves Search Rankings

We mentioned before that images are doing a important role in boost your SEO. Text part is a one of important part of a website. Text based pages, posts, and documents are doing significant things to make website get better rank in search engine rankings and boost SEO. Not only Google but also other search engines.

But posts or pages that have visual content like  images, slideshows, infographics, and videos along with text doing a great job than pages that have only text. They improve page visibility and make better ranking more than pages that have only text. Images needs to be high quality, optimized for SEO in several ways, mobile responsive, and being relevant to a user’s search query. 

But improving page visibility depends on the images and videos, you are going to upload. All visual contents needs to be relevant with the post content. Otherwise there is no use of having them in your post. And also they need to be in a good a quality. having relevant and keyword rich text with images gives you more benefits.

Website visitors always try to find what they want easily and quickly with minimum effort. Its your duty to give them relevant information within shorter amount of time in a accessible format.

When Google crawling webpages and make them into rankings, They look for its keywords and content also. They are looking how and where you have used them, not only text but also visual content. If your visual content has the criteria that is needed, it will improve the ranking of the post, that is attached with.

If you are running a business website, images are the most important part of your website. They will attract more visitors to your site and encourage them to stay and read and share your content.  Images also give more content to search engines for crawl and index in search engine optimization. The most important part in images SEO is alt text. We will discuss it in a below section.

Where to find the best images for your WordPress website

Google like to have original content. Therefore when adding images to your website make sure to use original images not cookie-cutter stock images that can be found anywhere. If you don’t have original images, there are may ways to find free pictures and images. You can use  imagery database like SplitShire , Unsplash and  Shutterstock. They have unique images and graphics. You can search what you want from these websites, as the way you search in Google for information.

6 Image SEO Tips for WordPress

To get advantages from image SEO, you need to use it correctly. Now we are going to show you some tips for it. If you follow them, you will be able to make your website more exciting and attractive.

1. Optimize Image Size and Quality

Your website’s load time and readability are important factors that optimizing your images for get better SEO. You need to use images with good quality. If you use large size of images, your site will be sluggish. We recommend here to use images smaller than 100 kb. If your images are bigger than this limit, you can  resized them to the size you want. If you’re not sure whether your images slowing down your pages or not, try Pingdom and check your website’s speed.

Let’s think as a visitor. What would you do, if a website that you are going to reach takes some times to be loaded. Would you be waiting till it being loaded or move on to the next site. There are many sites are available with the same content that you want. Then what is the reason for wait for one? If you have loading issues with your site, the visitors won’t reach your site as the same way. This is just one of many reasons why image size and quality in your website matter.

2. Rename Every Image Before You Put It On Your Website

It doesn’t matter where your images come from, they always has a image name. As an example, if you downloaded the image from an image database, it has a file number as its image name. If you upload a image from your camera, it might have a filename which starts with three letters and few numbers.

Before you upload images to your site, you need to rename them properly. Because their original names won’t give much SEO and its harder Google to understand its content. You can give them a name that relevant to both post content and image content with your focus keyphrase. Adding focus keyphrase at the beginning of the file name is better.

If you forget to rename your image before uploading, there are some ways to rename it. You can use  Enable Media Replace for it. Using this tool, you can replace images in your website’s media library without deleting them manually. You can also rename images on your desktop and upload it again.

3. Use Hyphens in Image Names

When adding image name you need to use hyphens to improve image SEO, not underscores. If you use underscores, it will join your terms. But if you use hyphens between the terms, it will separates them. Let’s take an example. Imagine your image name is “red plaid shirt”. If you use hyphens, it will show as “red-plaid-shirt”  and Google will get better understanding about it.

But if you use  underscores instead, it will show as “red_plaid_shirt”. Google will understand it as a one word like “redplaidshirt”. Do you think it will give you better SEO or ranking. Not exactly. Because, Google has gotten it wrong. You need to think about this matter specially, when adding URLs. URLs needs to use hyphens, not underscores.

4. Keep Image SEO Simple

Don’t make your image name fancy and overload it with keywords. You need to make it simple and a way that describe image content properly. If you are using your company logo as image, just name it as “XYZ-company-logo” and that’s enough. Think image keywords as link keywords. Use different terms when adding image names.

5. Fill In the Title and Alt Fields

Alternative text also called alt text, alt attributes and alt descriptions is the most important part in image SEO. Alt text is used within an HTML code to describe the image appearance and function on a page. You can use a short sentence to describe the image. It should be included the relevant SEO keywords that you want Google and other search engines to see. Simply enter what is in the image to its alt text. It will help both search engines and people to make sense of it.

6. Make Changes When You Change Your SEO Strategy

Every time you Change Your SEO Strategy, you also need to update images. Go back and change the alt tags and upload newly renamed files. The traffic from Google Image searches is about 15 to 20 percent of the whole traffic on a website. Now you can get a better idea about how much important to updating alt tags. If you do not do it, people will go somewhere else site.

Make Video Content Searchable

Now we are going to discuss about another important visual content. Video is the most popular visual content on the web. You cannot optimize most of videos directly. Because they are almost embedded from another site like YouTube or Vimeo. If you want to make them more searchable, you have to optimize them on the site where it appears.

Final Thoughts

There ae many factors impact to boost SEO. Image SEO is one of them. You can directly upload images to your site into WordPress, without changing the image file after downloading it from Google. But if image file size is too large or its name is not relevant to your content, you need change them. Because they don’t give you better SEO. If you follow above methods properly, you would be able to improve SEO and get better ranking in search results.

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