SEO Image Best Practices: 11 Ways to Better Optimize Your Images

SEO image best practices matter. You may think that Google and other search engines don’t care about your images if you’re not a photographer with galleries full of them, but they are one of the MOST under utilized opportunities on your site.

I won’t lie, image optimization tends to be an afterthought. I’m guilty of that too…

They’re usually added after the post, and used to fill the gaps because they’re “necessary.” Not only that but by the time you find them and download them, changing the name and writing solid alt text for the correct image just seems like a waste of time. 

But it’s not.

You’re in competition against everyone else, and if they’re all doing it correctly and you skip the image SEO, chances are you’ll be dropped to the bottom of the list. Take this opportunity to grab the advantage over your competition SEO-wise.

What is image SEO?

Image SEO, or image search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing images on your website to improve your site’s visibility on search engines. While traditional SEO focuses on optimizing written content through strategic keyword placement and other tactics, Image SEO concentrates on images and their associated attributes.

Many people underestimate the importance of image SEO, but they play a crucial role in user engagement and blog traffic. When properly optimized, images can significantly increase your visibility in search engine results, particularly in image-based searches on platforms like Google Images.

Why is this important?

Visual content is a powerful tool for engaging audiences – in fact, studies show that content with relevant images gets 94% more views than without. When users search for specific terms, they may choose to explore the ‘images’ tab in their search engine, leading them to a plethora of related visual content.

If your images are well-optimized, your website can appear in these search results, boosting your site’s overall exposure. Honestly, I once managed to rank for the search term “Brendan Fraser” (yes, as in the actor) with quality image SEO.

Remember, every image on your website is a potential SEO asset. Just as you wouldn’t miss out on optimizing your written content, your images too deserve that level of attention to ensure your website’s overall SEO success.

SEO Image Best Practices

1. Understand Copyright

Before we can start optimizing our images for search engines, we need to find images that we can LEGALLY use. Most of us are NOT lawyers (myself included, so this is NOT legal advice), but we do need to understand a bit about copyright law to blog.

This is an area where people seem to take action and ask for forgiveness later, but copyright lawsuits are no joke. In simple (non-legal advice) terms, you CANNOT publish an image if you DO NOT have a license to do so. Under ANY circumstance. 

This means that you cannot:

• Take images off Google and publish them to your website
• Take images off social media and publish them to your website
• Take images off stock media sites and publish them to your website

… unless you have permission. In most cases, permission is an actual licence that says you can. You get these licences by purchasing credits and/or memberships from stock sites like Envato Elements. The size of your website or the nature of your business does not exempt you from the potential legal consequences of copyright infringement.

Copyright violations are MUCH more of a common problem than most bloggers believe. When I audit a blog pre-sale one of the FIRST things I look at is the images. If the images are copied straight from Google or other sources and they owner does NOT have permission, the site gets denied. 

So, how do you properly source images?

Given the potential legal and ethical issues that come with image use on blog, let’s talk about how you can legally source images.

Envato or CanvaPro

The BEST ways to source images and legally protect yourself is to use a paid service that provides a license. Envato Elements and Canva Pro are my two top recommendations.

Canva Pro allows you to access quality images and graphics that you can use on your blog and create social media content. You can do everything from simply set up a profile picture to create engaging graphics. 

Envato Elements has a membership that allows you to access downloadable assets from images and fonts to videos, you can then use these on your site. You can also upload the assets to Canva Pro, and use them to create great graphics.

The real drawback to these services is that everyone else has access to them. So while they’re paid and have less usage than free apps, they’re still not unique and original. 

Pexels and Unsplash

For those that have zero budget available, there ARE options for you. However, the come with risks. Sites like Pexels and Unsplash provide free images that you can use for commercial and non-commercial purposes, most with no attribution required. While these are a good source for photos, there are risks.

The primary issues are that (a) other people have and will use the photos and (b) there have been issues of copyright owners pulling their images off the free sites then pursuing cases against creators and bloggers. With that in mind, you’ll want to make sure that you document where you source them from just to be sure. 

Take Your Own Photos

The BEST option in my opinion is that you take your own photos. This isn’t going to be a great solution for everyone, but Google LOVES unique images. They are able to look at your photo, tell what’s in it, and see that it’s unique. Having unique photos on your site is a great way to boost your sites SEO. 

2. Choose The Right Format

Image format is just as important as sourcing or optimizing your images, not all formats work well for online.

While PNG (Portable Networks Graphics) files are great because they have lossless compression (meaning they don’t lose any image factors), they’re VERY big and you don’t want them on your site. These files are great for uploading directly to social media platforms, like Pinterest.

However, you’ll want to change those images to a smaller file size before uploading them to your WordPress site.  

Given the importance of site speed and user experience for SEO, it’s recommended to use WebP (Web Picture Format) for your website images whenever possible. This is a small file type built directly by Google. WebP images are high quality, load quickly thus improving page speed, and provide an overall better user experience.

You can use a free tool like Convertio or CloudConvert that convert any image type to WebP. It’s important to note that WebP images don’t work for and on every program – while you can upload them to WordPress they don’t work on Pinterest. If you’re not able to use WebP format, I’d recommend JPEG (Join Photographic Experts Group). 

This is one of the most widely used image formats on the web, and while they’re a smaller file size than PNG, it won’t beat WebP. These files are able to retain a decent image quality, while providing high quality compression loves. This means you can reduce the file size (and by default the load speed), without making the picture look grainy. 

3. Compress Your Images

While choosing the right file size is great, you want to go one step further by compressing those images. One of the most common reasons a website loads slowly is because the images are too large – compression can help with that.

I use ShortPixel to compress my images, which has both monthly plans and one-time credit bundles. However, you can also get a lifetime deal to EWWW Image Optimizer on AppSumo. I haven’t personally tested them out, but a deal’s a deal!

It doesn’t matter which system for compressing your images you use as long as you do it consistently. 

Once you’ve compressed your images you can and should use a tool like Pingdom to check your page load speed before and after you compress all your images. If your website is image-heavy, the speed boost will be really satisfying. 

5. Customize Image File Names

Image SEO isn’t just about the image itself, it’s about ALL the data associated with it. One essential but often overlooked aspect of this is the file name. What you name your image files can significantly impact how search engines like Google interpret and subsequently index them.

By default, your camera, smartphone or even computer will assign each image file with a generic name. It might be “IMG748569” or “arnel-hasanovic-MNd-Rka1o0Q-unsplash.jpg”, or something equally as identifiable. And, if you haven’t guest it, that’s TERRIBLE for SEO.

To boost your Image SEO, it’s recommended to rename your image files with descriptive, meaningful names before uploading them to your website. In fact, I’d take that a bit further and use a keyword in the file name, if appropriate. This practice helps search engines understand the image content, which can lead to better visibility in image search results.

Not only is this helpful for SEO, but it also helps with organization. These are the top tips I recommend when it comes to naming your image files:

• Be descriptive and concise
• Use keywords strategically
• Use hyphens instead of spaces, always
• Keep it as short as possible

By optimizing your image file names, you provide search engines with valuable context about your image content, increasing the chances of your images (and consequently your website) being discovered in search results. Just like the images themselves, consider your file names as an essential component of your overall Image SEO strategy.

6. Write SEO-Friendly Alt Text

You should add alt text to EVERY image you have on your site. 

Alt tag SEO best practices say that keywords should be included in the alternative text tag of any image in your post, but alt text provides a service bigger than that. You want to use your alt text to describe the image, so that anyone seeing (or hearing) the text instead of the image understand what it is.

I want to stress that while image alt tags with SEO are best practices, we do not want to include keywords if it’s not relevant. The BASE of alt text is to provide image context that can be used by screen readers for those who may have trouble seeing the image.

When writing an alt text for images, follow the tips:

• Be accurate
• Use keywords appropriately
• Don’t ignore functional images (like those that serve as buttons or links)
• Keep it limited, no more than 125 characters
• Avoid redundancy, you don’t need words like “picture of” or “image of”

Useful alt text is important when it comes to image SEO best practices. 

7. Don’t Keyword Stuff

Keyword stuffing refers to when you overload your content with keywords to manipulate search engine rankings. It doesn’t matter where in your blog post you do this, you WILL be penalized by Google. 

While it’s encouraged that you use keywords in your file names, alt text, and captions, you need to understand that overdoing it can harm your SEO efforts. With that in mind, here are the tips we recommend:

• Prioritize Quality: The purpose of alt text and image descriptions is to enhance user experience and accessibility. Keywords should only be included if they fit naturally and accurately depict the image content.
• Be Relevant and Specific: Only use keywords that are directly relevant to the image. Forced or irrelevant keywords can confuse search engines and users alike.
• Moderation is Key: Even if a keyword is highly relevant, avoid using it excessively. Try to balance keyword usage with the overall readability and value of your content.

Remember, the goal of SEO isn’t just to rank highly in search engine results but also to provide valuable and engaging content to your audience. Focusing too much on keywords at the expense of content quality can do more harm than good. Keep your image optimization tactics user-focused, and natural keyword inclusion will follow.

8. Define Your Dimensions

Image dimensions matter and setting proper image dimensions is a vital practice in Image SEO.

By defining the width and height of an image in the HTML or CSS of your website, you help the browser allocate the correct amount of space on a page before the image loads. This can improve your website’s loading speed.

How can you do this? You need to:

• Size Images Correctly: Make sure your images are the right size for their intended use on your website. Overly large images can slow down page load speed and create a poor user experience.
• Define Dimensions in HTML/CSS: Include width and height attributes for each image in your website’s HTML or CSS. This allows browsers to reserve the correct amount of space for images before they load, preventing layout shifts that can disrupt the user experience.
• Consider Responsive Design: Make sure your images render properly on all devices. Use CSS to ensure that your images scale and resize correctly for different screen sizes and orientations.

By taking the time to properly define your image dimensions, you not only optimize your website for search engines but also create a smoother, more engaging user experience. ShortPixel can help you do this.

9. Make Your Images Mobile-Friendly

In the era of smartphones, optimizing your images for mobile users is a necessity. Google has implemented mobile-first indexing, which means it predominantly uses the mobile version of a website for indexing and ranking. If your images aren’t mobile-friendly, it can negatively impact both your Image SEO and overall SEO performance.

If mobile-friendly content is new to you, here is how you can successfully get it done on your website:

• Responsive Design: Use responsive image techniques to ensure your images display correctly on various screen sizes. CSS can be used to adjust the size and scale of your images based on the viewing context.
• Compress Images: Mobile users often have slower internet connections, so image file size matters. Compress your images to reduce their file size without significantly compromising quality, ensuring faster load times for mobile users.
• Appropriate Image Resolution: High-resolution images can appear stunning on desktop but can cause slow load times on mobile. Opt for a resolution that balances quality and speed.
• Touchscreen-Friendly: On mobile, images may also function as buttons or links. Ensure these are large enough to be easily tapped on a touchscreen.

By optimizing your images for mobile, you enhance the user experience for a significant portion of your audience and improve your website’s performance in search engine rankings, benefiting your overall SEO strategy.

10. Add Images To Your Sitemap

Your sitemap is what helps Google explore and understand your site. Including images in your website’s sitemap is an important step towards optimizing your Image SEO.

A sitemap provides search engines with a roadmap of your website, allowing them to find and index content more efficiently. By incorporating your images into this roadmap, you increase their visibility to search engines.

Two ways you can do this are:

• Use a Sitemap Generator: There are several online tools and plugins that can generate an updated sitemap for your website, including all images. These tools typically create a separate image:image tag for each image in your sitemap file. I use RankMath to generate (and update) my site map.
• Manual Addition: If you’re comfortable with the technical side, you can manually add image information to your XML sitemap. For each URL, you can include details of the images present on that page within image:image tags.

Remember, adding images to your sitemap doesn’t guarantee they’ll be indexed by search engines, but it does help search engines discover your images more easily. This increased visibility can lead to improved Image SEO, contributing to your website’s overall search engine performance.

11. Use Lazy Load

Lazy loading is a technique that can significantly boost your website’s loading speed and consequently, your Image SEO. It works by only loading the images that are in a user’s viewport, delaying the loading of other images until the user scrolls to them.

Lazy load helps to improve load speed by only loading the necessary images as you need them. It also helps preserve bandwidth by ensuring that your site doesn’t load anything that the users won’t see. It can be implemented with JavaScript libraries, but quality hosts (like Lyrical Host) often allow you to do this from your main panel, cutting the extra plugin, tools or code needed for it.

It’s important to note that lazy loading needs to be implemented properly to ensure it doesn’t interfere with the indexing of your images by search engines. When poorly implemented, it can prevent search bots from seeing your images, hindering your Image SEO efforts.

Final Thoughts: SEO Image Best Practices

Images are an important part of your overall SEO strategy AND seriously impact (for better or worse) your site’s speed. I highly recommend starting image optimization as early on as you can, which can help cut down on time and work later on. 

You want to make sure you:

• Choose the right image format
• Define the dimensions
• Make them mobile friendly
• Properly construct the alt text AND file name
• Add them to your site map
• Are compressing images

Above all, make sure that you are LEGALLY using images. I simply cannot overstate the risk that’s involved with publishing images that you’re not allowed to use. Make sure you source your images from legitimate places and ensure you have the proper licencing.

Images that are properly built, optimized with relvant keywords, and load fast make a serious impact on your overall SEO strategy. Remember, the goal of Image SEO isn’t just about improving your search engine rankings. It’s also about delivering a more engaging and accessible user experience.

By optimizing your images effectively, you’re enhancing your site’s overall quality, potentially leading to higher traffic, engagement, and conversion rates. Keep these best practices in mind as you aim to deliver valuable content to your audience.

SEO Image Best Practices FAQs