Science and research have proved that the human brain processes images and visual inputs faster than textual inputs. Not only the process, but the human brain can also retain this information for a few days, but textual information is usually forgotten. Previously, images were not visually important for the browsers, as they were almost blind to the graphical aspect of the images. Only tags, descriptions, and titles of images were used by the browsers, making the visual image data set useless.
But recent developments in artificial intelligence and image processing have led to the creation of many useful tools which have changed the common shopping and photo search drastically.
Why use images?
Images and visuals are a preferred mode of information input these days, as it takes less effort to understand an image as compared to reading a long paragraph about it. Images help gain the attention of people, which is very common nowadays because of the increased use of social media.
How to optimize your website’s visuals?
1. Upload intellectual content.
Using proprietary content is a big part of considering your visuals optimized. Now the stock images are also your property if you buy them. But some websites provide paid content, not for a single person but for every individual. This means whoever pays for that image, can get it. There might be some people who buy the same image as you. This will not make your content unique but end up in duplication if he uploads it to a platform as well.
Create your own images. This will help you gain more traffic and stand out as unique in the eyes of the picture search algorithm. Also, many backlinks might be connected to your website this way, as people use unique images from other websites to enhance their own content. To get ideas to create images, you can perform a photo search process online. This will result in multiple relevant images online.
2. The caption of the image file.
Be careful while deciding the names for your images.
When you upload these images to a website, the algorithm uses its name to find out what the image is about. Picture search can use graphics to find objects and actions in images to figure out what they represent. But other than that, the file name of the image makes your browser understand the context.
Make sure to enter keywords in the image file name as SEO also considers keyword usage as a big aspect in optimization and making them hidden in filenames is a great technique. But make sure they are relevant to the image as picture search also considers these names while searching for similar photos.
3. Make your image scalable.
Make your images responsive.
So that if a user opens your blog or website he can see it clearly adjusted according to the screen size. If he opens it on a phone or tablet, the image should still be adjusted properly to fit in the frame.
If images are not optimized this way, it might affect user satisfaction, causing your website to be de-ranked in terms of SEO. All you need to do is add a simple max-width with 100% CSS code.
4. Image formats.
Choose the image format wisely that you use on the website. A very low-resolution image might be very blurry or unattractive, losing audience interest, and a very high-resolution image might be very heavy for the network to load in normal bandwidth. This might make trouble in picture search results, as your image won’t be displayed if the network was lagging, and it wasn’t able to load it.
This makes its chance 0% to be clicked, making your page fall in rankings.
5. Alt attribute.
Use alt attribute so that valuable information is shown on the website and picture search results when the image was unable to be loaded. This helps readers understand what the image is about.
Include keywords here too so that SEO ranks your page better.
6. Structure your image data set.
Instead of placing all your images in a generic folder, make separate folders for as many categories as you can. Try to put them in the categorized folders in which the main keywords explain those images best. This is one of the new image guidelines google recently gave out.
This increases the chances of your data appearing in picture search results.
Conclusion.
As discussed above, images have loads of ways to be optimized. Almost all steps are simple and don’t need an elaborate plan to execute but simple strategies that can lift your visual game not only SEO-wise but magnifying its chances of appearing in the picture search results.
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