High quality, interesting, and relevant content is one of the cornerstones of SEO optimisation. There are ways to make your content more engaging for your audience. You can write quality content that answers users’ queries, break them up in shorter paragraphs, use sub-headers and bullet points, and optimise your white space. However, there is no doubt that images are the most effective tools for making your content more enticing.

This short guide will walk you through the detailed instructions for how to optimize images on a website.

photo editing

A Step by Step Guide on How to Optimise Images on a Website

  1. Choose your images wisely.

The first step is choosing the right image that is related to the content. Each article must include images that illustrates the topic. The image must also be high quality, have good resolution, and large enough to be seen across different devices. Another important thing to make sure that that the image you use is copyright-free so you can avoid problems along the way. You might want to consider creating your own images, graphs, and charts to avoid copyright infringement and to boost your branding. Some SEO optimisation services providers also offer graphic design services.

  1. Edit and compress.

Once you have the image you want, you will want to do a bit of editing to begin your optimisation. First, you have to resize your image so you can reduce its load speed. Huge files take time to load and this affects your users’ experience which affects your rankings.  Second, you should also chose the right format. There are 4 most popular formats for images: JPG, GIF, PNG, SVG. Each has its pros and cons. Experts in SEO in Sydney recommend JPG for coloured images and PNG for simpler ones.

  1. Name it, tag it, and caption it.

To optimise images on a website, you have to make sure you edit the texts that come with it. This includes the following:

  • File Name – You must give your image an approriate title or file name. It will help you search for the image in your site’s back-end in the future.
  • Alt-Text – It is crucial for you to appropriately describe your image in the Alt section. This is because Google and other search engines cannot “see” but can “read”. It determines what is in the image by reading the alt-text. Your alt-text must be clear, concise, and accurately descriptive.
  • Caption – Although these might not help your SEO optimisation, giving your images the proper caption or description can help you organise your images more efficiently.
  1. Automise it.

Optimising images for SEO can be a lot of work but there are ways to streamline this process. If your site allows it, you can install an image optimisation plug in your site so you can automate the process.

If you optimise images on a website, you will not only improve your content’s readability, you will also improve organic traffic through the image results in search engines.