How to Optimize Images That Gets Your Site More Traffic

So you have a website that you have put a lot of effort in and still can’t figure out why it’s ranking is so poor?You may have read articles that tell you how to write great stuff and avoid mistakes but did anybody tell you to look at the images on your site?

Surprised? Anxious? Bewildered? Keep reading to know more

Properly optimized images are always favored by search engines such as Google and by some of the best Indian social networking sites. Such images show up when people search for photos on google images and this helps them come to YOUR WEBSITE

What else, you ask? Well, properly optimized images yield a better result on social media too! Improved result and connection of your pictures to social media sites gives them more exposure and thus FREE PROMOTION to your site

The following techniques are meantto get you and your site’s visitors a smooth experience while browsing through the content. It covers SEO, normal web developer stuff and social media tips:

1. Speed Up Webpages by changing the Image Size

So you’ve got lots of unique content, amazing dynamic images, complex animations, etc., but you forgot togive speed a thought?Understand this, when a user visits your website, it feels slower because people are trying to download some image that has not been optimized by you.

PERFORMANCEand SPEED are the keys here. It makes or breaks the user experience and it is also considered by the search engine results. Pictures with a big size not only slow your website down, they also hurt your SEO with Google.

The first step is to change the Resolution. The greater the resolution, the more the time a photo will take to load
Let’s say we don’t need an image meant for hd desktop backgrounds. So, it needs to be optimized for the web experience. It’s resolution and size will have to be changed.
Do the following:

• Take any image of your liking, for example, a full HD photo with 1920×1080 resolution
• Open the picture in image preview (if you are using Mac OS) (on windows use default image program)
• Change image dimensions by typing 700 in width. (Length will automatically change)

(Note: 600×300 is the optimum size for most pages)

2. Don’t let Images Create a new HTML Page and take care of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs):

Some content management systems often make a new URL after you have uploaded an image. This new URL is just a plain HTML page with an image on it. This causes it to get indexed thereby forming a duplicate page. So the best practice is to let the image exist on its own individual URL.



The second part of this point are the CDNs (Content Delivery Networks). If you want to increase page speed, then CDNs are extremely useful. They are a mode of servers spread globally and based on the users’ geo-location, and they deliver web pages and all page content (for e.g.; YouTube videos). It does so quickly and without interruptions.
They are also helpful in:

• Saving your online business, a good chunk of money
• PreventingDoS attack damage
• Optimizing sessions that minimizes the total open connections to your web server

(Note: A major drawback of using CDNs is they can lead to loss in page rankings as it changes URL by itself sometimes)

3. Use Keyword of your Page or Blog in your Image File Name –

The next two techniques are pretty simple to follow.

All cameras click a photo and give the file a generic name like ‘’00007.jpg’’. Since it contains no useful information, it confuses the search engine crawlers. The solution is to simply rename the photo by taking the keyword terms and using it.
For example: <keyword.jpeg>

Note:You can also use other file formats like PNG or GIF. Most people use JPEG for common web photos like a blog. GIFs and PNGs are mostly used for logos.

4. Use Keyword in Alternate Text (alt = keyword) – Alt Tags

These are a text alternative to photos on a web page. Depending on your browser settings, you will notice that upon taking your mouse pointer in the image area, an alt tag text or alternate text will come up while the image is still taking the time to load. So, make sure your keyword is in the alternate text. The idea behind alt text initially was to assist visually impaired people as their computers describe to them what the image is about.

Remember to enter information for each alt tag for every product picture on your page. This will be especially useful if you have an e-commerce site and you want to sell a product.
When Google crawls a page and it sees image and it sees all the keywords in sync to that image it knows what the image is about and it helps them rank it in google image search

5. Submit the Image Sitemap

Every website needs to have an Image XML sitemap. Some content management systems such as on WordPress site need an external SEO tool like Yoast, but a lot of time these things come installed. Make sure you are submitting the sitemap to Google image search console.
Doing so is important because:

• Often images are not crawled by Google crawl if they are not added to webpage source code. Their location in image site map is mandatory for web crawlers to function effectively.
• XML sitemaps help to make indexing of content fast. It alerts the search engine quickly upon any change in your content.

XML sitemaps are a great tool to help you as a content maker to form your stake as a content originator.
To give a sitemap in Google follow these steps:

1. Make sure that XML sitemap of your web server is available through its URL
2. Then go to Google Webmaster Tools and Log in
3. In the ‘’Crawl’’ section on the left hand side panel, choose the option of ‘’Sitemaps’’
4. Click the red option in the top right corner mentioned as ‘’Add/Test Sitemap’’. Enter the URL and then ‘’Submit Sitemap’’

Now all this information would certainly seem to be complicated at first, but do experiment with these steps by slowly incorporating them on your site instead of all of them at once.

Source : https://sabakuch.com/blog/2017/06/07/how-to-optimize-images-that-gets-your-site-more-traffic/