10+ Tips for Image SEO Optimisation in 2024

Understanding Image SEO is a crucial part to rank your website’s photos on Google. Humans are very visual creatures. We process pictures pretty rapidly as such pictures can grab our attention and we are drawn to them easily.

As there is a saying, a picture is better than a thousand words. Without images, the contents are average and monotonous. Using images on your site including charts, graphics, and visual content and designs are the prescriptions of good, stand-out content for the reader on a website as well as ranking high on the search engine.

What is Image SEO?

Image SEO refers to the process of optimising visual content on the website so that they are easy for search engines to read and understand. Consequently, image SEO also improves the visibility and ranking of the content in google and other search engines in the image search result.

Image SEO usually deals with a picture’s relevancy with the content, picture type, picture size, loading time, optimisation of alt text, and keywords in the image file names are all part of image SEO.

In this article, we will discuss the following necessary measures to undertake for Image Search Engine Optimisation:

• Choosing the right photo
• Image scale
• Optimising image size
• Image filename
• Image Alt text

1)  Choose the Right Image

Choosing the right picture relevant to the text is of utter importance for image optimisation. Your image should be relevant to the article that you are writing about so that Google understands and could bring the picture to the image search results.

Say, your article about Pizza. Ideally, your photo should be relevant to the service of Pizza rather than a photograph of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean.

It is always recommended that you use original and unique photos i.e., photographs taken by yourself rather than stock phones or photos obtained from free sources. These pictures taken from stock photos have usually been used several times and thus lose their uniqueness

Those photos severely affect your image SEO. So, it is wise to use original, unique, and relevant pictures for your content rather than using stock photos.

If you don’t have original photos that you may use, there are other ways to find unique pictures rather than using stock photos.

There are many platforms like

• Flickr.com
• Shutter Stock
• Photo Bucket
• Unsplash etc

can be nice sources for your picture. Always remember to credit the source or photographer in your article.

You may also use alternatives for photos like graphs and illustrations as well as animated GIFs. Although GIFs are popular, they also can make your content harder to read as the movement of the pictures may distract our readers’ attention.

2)  Image Scale:

Image scale is an important part of image SEO optimisation. Without proper image scaling, your article might blow out of proportion. It might look chunky and unattractive. Image Scale usually refers to the dimension of the pictures.

On a website, there is usually a right sidebar, a left sidebar, and a content area. The scale of the picture depends on the theme and the page format and the availability of the space for the content. Most importantly, the photo should look like it fits well with the content.

There are several tools you may use for scaling your photo in the content such as

• photoshop
• gimp
• Paint.net
• Many More

There are also a few recommendations that you may use such as Shopify recommends a typical square photo to be 2048 x 2048 aspect ratio. Other aspect ratios are also available for you to consider depending on the availability of space.

3)  Optimise Image Size:

Optimising the image size is essential for your site for faster loading time. Site speed has one of the biggest impacts on your image SEO. They are the single most important factor in the ability for ranking and greater traffic for your website.

There are many times when improperly sized images are the primary contributor to a website’s speed. It is important to reduce the image size as much as possible without reducing the quality of your picture.

There are many open-source free image compressor tools for your consideration like

• Guetzli
• MozJPEG
• Pngquant
• ImageOptim

which may help in reducing the image size without reducing its quality.

There are also some other helpful WordPress plugins like

• WP Smush,
• Short Pixel
• Imagify

This plugin automatically scales photos as well as helps in responsiveness i.e., for your mobile device, this plugin will automatically reduce or resize the picture for a better user experience as well as faster loading speed.

4)  Image Filename

Image SEO typically starts with the image file name. You would always want the search engine to know what the picture is all about without even looking at it. Thus, when it comes to SEO, it is crucial in creating descriptions, relevant text as well as keyword-rich filenames in proper image formats.

Typically, file image names usually look like ‘’IMG_532454’’ or something similar. This naming doesn’t help Google understand what the picture is all about. Thus, the search engine needs to understand the photo and change the file name from the default to improve your SEO strategy with relevant text.

If you are writing an article about the Sydney Opera House, and you are using a photograph showing the Sydney Opera house overlooking the harbour area. Then your image formats should be Sydney-Opera-House-and-Harbour rather than any meaningless name.

For naming a file, it is recommended to use hyphens rather than using spaces between words.

5)Image Alt Text

Image alt text is significantly the most important factor for SEO optimisation. Alt Text is short for alternative text which is used to describe the photo on the webpage.

All the search engines available now usually place a higher value on alt tags to determine what the picture is all about. As Google and other search engines crawl through your page, an image with properly formatting alt text helps to index when it is ranked.

For website coding, i.e., HTML coding, the source of the photograph is described under the syntax ‘’img src’’. It is an ideal way to load an image onto the website. One can easily add an alt tag in this syntax so describe the file for example: <img src=”demo.jpg” alt=”demo” />

The best part of Alt-text is that whenever you find a glitch and the snapshot is having complications on loading, your search engine can still read and understand what the photo is all about.

The search engine places a high value on alt tags to determine what the photo is all about. A good alt tag provides the context to the picture as well as helps visually impaired users too.

Alt text allows screen readers to read information about the pictures out loud. This helps visually impaired individuals to access the information provided by a photo and understand the purpose of that picture.

Below are some best practices for Alt Tags for image SEO strategies:

• Product images should be optimised for the same keywords of the product page
• Text of the products should be as maximum as possible for its impact. Shorter alt text is more likely to be indexed by Google as well as other major online searches. Thus, it will be difficult for Google to optimise.
• Refrain from keyword stuffing as Google and other search engines disfavour such practice.
• Pages with image-have images that are very light on the text and should only be prioritised for alt tags.

Advance Tips:

As you have started on Image SEO. Below are some advanced tips to help boost your picture on google.

6) Use a Content Delivery Network to Serve Images:

If you are a small start-up, using a content delivery network is optional as your blogs or posts contain a small number of images.

 When your website becomes a giant i.e., traffic and speed such as news portals and e-commerce. Especially when you have millions of files of videos and images then web speed becomes an issue and thus you need to use a CDN network to serve your images.

 The CDN network helps to increase the speed as well as load time of the web page. They help to solve the annoying delay when loading media files. 

When using CDNs for your image on your website, all the images will be delivered to the CDN’s server thus enormously increasing the speed of your page load.

7) Choose The Right Format:

There is no right kind of format for Image SEO. As there are many formats available, the most common for the web is PNG, JPEG and WebP.

• Portable Network Graphics, best known as PNG, produces the best quality of images but has a larger file size. Using PNG files makes your webpage have and thus results in slower loading time 
• Joint Photographic Experts Group, best known to be JPEG, is the most popular file format. They have a smaller file size, but you may lose picture quality when compressing those files. You can always adjust the quality level to find a good balance between file size and image quality using an image resizing tool.
• WepP is an image file format that is created by Google. WebP supports both compression techniques and gives the best results after compression. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency. They are usually supported on only Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox

So, if you have any idea about your targeted audience’s specific browsers or devices then make sure to check the preferred format which supports that browser.

8) Copyright Issue:

You must always make sure that there is no copyright conflict regardless of the image you choose. You will be on the verge of an expensive lawsuit if your photograph is owned by other stock photo providers like Getty Images, Shutterstock, or Deposit photos.

There are photos available for reuse on stock sites which allows users to use those photos on different websites. You may use those photographs without any conflict of copyright issues.

9) Adding Images to Your Sitemap:

Adding images to your sitemap gives Google changes to easily crawl through the entire website’s picture and adding those pictures to your sitemap gives an extra boost to rank the image on google.

The chances of search engines crawling and indexing your image in the sitemap are significantly increased upon having the image in the sitemap. This results in more site traffic and thus boosts SEO strategy.

Yoast and Rank Maths offer sitemap solutions in their plugin for your WordPress website.

10) Add Structured Data or Schema Markup

Adding Structured Data or Schema markup is an important part of image SEO optimisation. They let your content guide your search engine for better delivery of visual results. The search engine serves the results of your picture when you add structured data.

Once you add schema markup on your website with the proper image as a product, Google pairs those images as a product with the price tag. Google skips its algorithm and uses the information provided in the schema markup to prove the correct picture.

Aus Asia Online Your Best Solutions

Search Engine Optimisation is not always straightforward as well as not so complicated. There are added benefits of adding images to your site and optimising those images to rank better on Google. The benefits of ranking your website on google to the top page of the search engines are hard work but are worth taking.

You may always take help from professionals like Aus Asia Online who have vast experience in WordPress website ranking. They have a highly skilled team of professionals who have vast experience in SEO and are happy to help you in ranking your web page and image on Google.