Optimizing Images for Search Engines

on 26 feb 2024, by Bogdan, in Blog, WordPress, Cloud, FREE, Guides

by Bogdan

If you want to enhance your visual content with Brizy’s image SEO strategies and improve its discoverability, this guide is perfect for you.

Optimizing images on your website helps search engines easily locate visual content and accurately present relevant information to your target audience. This will result in increased organic traffic as more visitors will want to engage with your content.

This guide aims to showcase the best Brizy image SEO practices and techniques for better online visibility. We’ll cover the following:

What is image SEO (and why images are so important)
10 image SEO optimization tips and best practices to upgrade your website

So, stick around for the best image SEO tips that will attract more potential visitors to your Brizy website and boost your conversions.

Let’s start with what image SEO is.

What is image SEO (and why images are so important)

Image SEO is a set of practices for optimizing images on a website to enhance their visibility and ranking in search engine results pages(SERPs).

Just like traditional SEO focuses on optimizing site content, image SEO focuses on optimizing images to enhance the overall SEO strategy of a website. For example, optimizing for image SEO can help your site rank higher on Google Images, Google Discover, and other search engines.

Why image SEO is important to your website

Image SEO is important for multiple reasons:

Enhances visual search (Increases organic traffic)

With the rise of visual search technologies, such as Google Images and Pinterest, optimizing images can help drive traffic to your website through image-based searches.

Additionally, Google Image searches account for 22.6% of all online searches. Failing to pay attention to your image SEO implies you’ll be missing out on the possibility of attracting a huge amount of organic traffic to your website.

Improves search experience for your audience

Images provide a visual representation of site content which can help users easily understand and engage with your text content. To be specific, when users perform a search, seeing relevant images alongside textual results can help them:

Quickly identify whether the content is what they're looking for.
Assess the relevance of search results more quickly – For example, if someone is searching for "modern living room designs," seeing thumbnail images of various living room designs in the search results allows them to quickly identify which results are most relevant to their query.
Images can serve as visual cues or triggers for users to explore your content further.

Increases user engagement

Search engines like Google are increasingly showing images in the regular search results, often above the usual organic results. As we've mentioned above, high-quality and relevant images can increase user engagement, which means they'll stay on the page longer and leave less quickly (lowering bounce rates).

Improves accessibility on your site

Site accessibility is becoming a legal requirement in many countries. Optimizing images with descriptive alt text and proper captions improves accessibility for users with visual impairments, making your content more inclusive.

Essentially, images are an important part of on-page SEO. This technique usually optimizes a website’s content by modifying things like headlines, images, and HTML tags (title tags, meta descriptions, images, links, headers, etc).

In this guide, we’ll focus on image SEO best practices and tips that will enhance your Brizy website.

8 Brizy image SEO optimization tips and best practices to upgrade your website

In this section, we’ll discuss eight Brizy image SEO tips that can help you optimize your images and rank higher on search engines and visual search.

What is Brizy's website builder?

Brizy is an all-in-one white-label website builder that enables you to build modern and professional using a variety of ready-made templates and layouts. Everything is fully customizable to fit your brand. If you want to design your website from scratch, Brizy has an intuitive drag & drop builder to help you with just that.

This robust site builder is available for both WordPress and the Cloud platform. Particularly, Brizy combines several image SEO techniques to help you optimize your image SEO strategy and make the most out of your images.

Brizy lets you implement the following image SEO best practices and tips to enhance your image SEO:

1. Add relevant and accurate Alt text descriptions of your images

Alt text (or alternative text) is a clear and concise written description of an image. It’s also referred to as alt tags or alt attributes.

A well-optimized text should clearly describe the image content, including both the brand and the action being depicted, and provide context for the user without sounding unnatural. Let’s have a look at an example of this SEIKO brand watch.

Poor alt text: alt="watch"

Good alt text: alt="silver stainless steel watch"

Better alt text: alt="Seiko silver stainless steel watch with black dial"

Best alt text: alt="Seiko silver stainless steel chronograph watch with black dial and date display"

An alt text does two main things. It provides a textual description of the image content for users with visual impairment or when the image fails to load. Secondly, an alt text tells search engines what the image shows. This can help search engine crawlers index your website more effectively, and boost your search results.

You can add optimized alt text to your Brizy Cloud website without knowing a thing about HTML. After you upload an image to your photo library, you can fill out details including alt text using your Brizy page builder.

Adding image alt text is also easy in other content management systems, like WordPress(just follow the step above), Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify.

2. Write descriptive image filenames

Search engines recommend that images should be named properly before you can upload them to your website. You can do this while uploading images to your WordPress website.

The file name you choose impacts how search engine crawlers easily interpret your image. Therefore, for the best SEO results, give descriptive names to all images before uploading from your computer.

For example, instead of “IMG_12345.jpg,” use “pastel-striped-white-air-force-1.jpg” if it’s an image of a sneaker.

The filename “IMG_12345.jpg” doesn’t tell Google what the image is.

Tip: Additionally, Google recommends using hyphens rather than underscores to separate words. And if you plan to translate or localize a webpage, change the file names accordingly.

3. Compress your images

Brizy compresses your images without compromising the quality to an unacceptable degree. Consequently, this will also reduce the image file size, decrease page load times, and in turn improve your SEO.

NOTE: Page loading speed is a significant factor in search engine rankings — and Google generously rewards sites that load faster with higher rankings.

How to optimize your images with Brizy

Brizy enables you to optimize your images using the ShortPixel software tool. Brizy site builder has a unique way of handling images. It creates a special folder for images where it stores all images you will use in Brizy pages – for either desktop, mobile devices or retina displays.

NOTE: This image optimization option only works for Brizy version 1.0.76 or higher.

After confirming your Brizy version, simply go to Brizy > Optimize Images on your WordPress dashboard. You’ll be asked to provide an API key. This is where ShrtPixel comes in. To get the API key, simply go to the ShortPixel website, paste your API key on this window, and save. Next, click the Optimize tab and hit the Optimize image button to optimize all images in the Brizy folder.

For more information on how to optimize Brizy images with ShortPixel read this detailed guide.

4. Choose the right image file format

Different file formats offer different advantages and are suitable for different types of images. During compression, the image file format you choose will entirely depend on what you plan to do with it and the image you want to use. Brizy supports multiple image formats, including;

JPG: which is the most popular image format. Used when you need a balance between image quality and smaller file sizes. It’s suited for showcasing photographs, online artwork, or useful for emailing preview images.
PNG: for images with transparency, sharp edges, and text, even if it results in a larger file size.
WebP: Use this format when you need higher compression than a JPEG or PNG. Supports images and animated images without sacrificing color depth, animated frames, etc., but doesn’t work with older browsers.
SVG: is great for scalable graphics. Use it for icons, logos, etc.

NOTE: Google Search also supports the above images in addition to BMP and GIF. It's also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the file type.

5. Create an image sitemap

Image sitemaps are a good way of telling Google about other images on your site. These are usually images that Google hasn’t discovered yet. You can create a separate image sitemap or add image sitemap tags to an already existing sitemap.

This dedicated image sitemap will enable Google to easily discover and showcase your images in search results.

NOTE: An image sitemap is a lot like a regular XML sitemap, except it only lists the URLs to your images.

There is, however, one key difference between an image sitemap and regular sitemaps for our web pages. You can include URLs from other domains in your image sitemaps. This allows you to use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to host images (more on this in the next section).

How to make Google find your Image sitemap quickly

If you want Google to find your image sitemap quickly, what you’ll need is to add the image sitemaps to your Google Seach Console account.

After you create an account, you need to add a website property and also verify ownership (if you’re using a CDN) before you can add your sitemap XML. Verifying the ownership of a CDN domain name in the Search Console will enable Google to alert you of any crawl errors that they find.

In the Sitemaps section, you can add your sitemap XML URL /sitemap.xml

NOTE: With an image sitemap, you can include up to 1,000 images for each page. You can follow Google’s example and instructions to manually create one.

6. Use responsive images

According to a report from Hitwise, nearly 60% of all online searches are now carried out on a mobile device. For some sectors, like Food and Beverage, online searches reach up to 72%.

For this reason, it is important to ensure that your images are also responsive so that your users can see images on any type of device. If your images aren't responsive, the page won't appear as clean on mobile as it does on desktop – and this can affect your SEO and hurt your brand.

Fortunately, the Brizy website builder already handles this for you. This tool enables you to enables you to design websites that are mobile-friendly. The images you upload to your website will automatically adjust depending on the screen your audience accesses your website on.

7. Add schema markup to your images

Schema markup or structured data is data that helps search engines clearly understand content or information on your website. Adding schema markup to your images will show your images as rich results in the search result pages.

Here is an example of a recipe schema in action for high-calorie cookies. This type of rich snippet shows a related image, reviews of the recipe, prep time, and a short list of ingredients:

Brizy enables you to also add schema markup to your images. Simply, go to our Brizy editor and open Project Settings. Click the Code Insert icon and you’ll be able to add your schema markup code as CSS code, in the header, or the footer sections.

For detailed instructions, read our guide on how to add schema markup to your Brizy website.

8. Use content delivery network

A content delivery network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service relative to the end user's location.

So, let’s say you’re located in the U.S. It will be much quicker to load content from a U.S. server than from a server based in Asia.

Tip: Brizy offers a solid, high-performance CDN for FREE with any project created in Brizy Cloud.

Using Brizy CDN will also enable you to leverage browser caching. Browser caching saves your site files on a visitor’s browser. When the visitor returns to your site, the image assets and other site files will load much faster and improve their experience.

Other techniques you can implement to optimize your images for SEO include lazy loading images, using captions to describe your images, posting original photos(instead of stock photos), backlinking your images, and much more.

Conclusion

As site owners, taking your time to optimize your website’s images for SEO efficiently will significantly boost site traffic, increase your site’s visibility, and solidify your online presence.

Using Brizy website builder streamlines the image SEO optimization process for you. It combines multiple image SEO strategies that will improve user experience on your website through faster loading times and enhanced accessibility.

Article by Bogdan

Co-founder & Head of Design, Bogdan has a passion for everything that works great and looks awesome. Guilty for most of the UI and UX around this place, you can say "Hi" to him at bogdan at brizy dot io