If you are a blogger or write articles for an online magazine or newspaper, you likely encounter this question on a daily basis: Should I add an image to my article? The answer is “Yes”.
Images make an article more vivid and can actually contribute to improving the SEO for your article. In this post, I’d like to explain the steps that should be taken to fully optimize an image for SEO.
Use Images
Images, when added with a certain consideration, will help understand your article a lot. “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Yeah, well, probably not for Google, but it can for sure spice up a 1000 dull words, illustrate what you mean in a chart or data flow diagram, or simply make your social media efforts more attractive.
It’s a simple recommendation: use images to every article you write online. It’ll make it more appealing.
Finding The Right Image
If you have the opportunity to add your own image, please do so. Your team page needs pictures of your team, not 
this dude on the right or one of his stock photo friends. (Off topic: that dude might need a haircut.)
Your article needs an image that has the same subject as your article. If you use an image just to use an image and get a green bullet in our Yoast SEO plugin, you are doing it wrong. The image should reflect the topic of the post, or have illustrative purposes within the article, of course.
There is a simple image SEO reason for that: an image that is surrounded by related text ranks better for the keyword it is optimized for. (More details on image SEO later.)
You might have seen the images we use for our posts (the ones with the titles). We have added these for a number of reasons:
- They emphasize the title or subject of the post
- It’ll trigger a visitor to read the post, as the first view isn’t just text
- These images are used in OpenGraph tags and Twitter Cards, which will add the image to our social shares.
Just another way to go about adding images. By the way, most of the ‘featured images’ we use are stock photos. We have made them our own by adding the title to the picture, making the actual image subservient to the text in the image. That goes against a much-heard recommendation to not add text in images, but as mentioned, we use that specific image for other purposes, not per se for SEO.
If there is no way to use images of your own, there are other ways to find more unique images and refrain from using stock photos. Flickr.com is a nice image source for instance, as explained in this article: How to Use Creative Commons Images from Flickr. I also like the images provided by sites like freeimages.com (formerly known as sxc.hu). You should stay away from the obvious stock photos, and rather pick the ones that look (ok, just a bit) more genuine. It almost seems like images with people always look like stock photos, unless taken by yourself. In the end, that is still the best idea.
Obvious alternatives for photos could be illustrations, like we sometimes use, or graphs, of course. An honorable mention should go to animated GIFs, as these seem to become more and more popular these days.
Animated GIFs are very popular these days
Don’t go overboard. It’ll make your post less attractive to read, as your reading will be interrupted by the movement in the image, of course. Like in the post where I found the above image.
Preparing Images For Use in Your Article
When you have found the right image to use, either an illustration, chart or photo, the next step is to optimize that image for use on your website. There are a number of things to take in consideration:
Choose The Right File Name
Image SEO starts with the right file name. Of course this is the first location to use that keyword. Without even looking at the actual image, you want Google to know what the image is about. It’s simple: if your image is a sunrise in Paris showing the Notre Dame, the file name shouldn’t be DSC4536.jpg, but notre-dame-paris-sunrise.jpg. The main keyword would be Notre Dame, as that is the main subject of the photo, that is why I added that at the beginning of the file name.
Scale For Image SEO
Loading times are an important UX, and therefore SEO, aspect. The faster the site, the easier it is to visit and index your page. Images can have a huge impact on loading times, especially when you load a huge image and show it really small, like using a 2500×1500 pixels image and showing it at 250×150 pixels size. The entire image will still have to be loaded. Scale the image to the size you want to show it. WordPress helps by providing the image in multiple sizes after upload. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the file size is optimized as well, that’s just the image size.
Reduce File Size
The next step in image SEO should be to make sure that scaled image is served in the smallest file size possible. There are tools for that. Of course you could just export the image and test what percentage of quality is acceptable, but I prefer (especially with retina and similar screens) to use 100% quality images.
Optimize image file size for instance using JPEGMini
You can still reduce the file size of these images by for instance removing the EXIF data. We recommend using tools like ImageOptim or websites like JPEGMini or PunyPNG. I’ve also heard great stories about Kraken.io, but I haven’t used them myself, to be honest.
After you have uploaded the image, tools like YSlow can tell you if your image optimization succeeded.
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Michiel Heijmans
Latest posts by Michiel Heijmans (see all)
- How to Use “hreflang” for Multilingual Websites - April 14, 2015
- How to Optimize Images For SEO - February 27, 2015
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Thanks for your informative article Michael! I’m glad to know that I’m already implementing many of these SEO strategies for images. I would be interested in know what you would rank as the number one most important technique to adapt when it comes to optimizing images on your website. I would say compression images for a quicker load time. Once again, thanks for a great article!
Hello Michiel, this is a good post and you almost pointed out each and every corners of image optimization. I used to get one image optimization question from several website owners, newbie SEO and designers. Suppose if we have a webpage where we have lots of images getting shown dynamically or may be by a CMS. How will you optimize the image alt and title attributes, with same alt & title on all images or with different alt and & title?
I always suggest to maintain unique, specific and relevant image alt and title texts on all images (though sometimes it’s really tough to achieve). Will like to hear your opinion.
Regards
Soumya Roy
Something that I find to be missing in HTML markup is a caption tag for images. The current markup must be used with tables. It seems to me this is a no-brainer that this should exist. Am I missing something?
Hi Myron,
In HTML5, there is a figcaption tag: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_figcaption.asp
Cheers,
Michiel
Great article Thanks
I enjoyed this article and shared it on my new blog. I hope that is ok.
I’ve shared this with our clients – to emphasize why we do all the stuff that could be considered “not needed”.
I shall now go back and practice what you’ve preached on our new website which launched on Friday! Happy days (or night!)
Glad you liked the post Ashley!! It’s a good one.
Hi Michiel,
thanks for a great summary.
I have one question about Featured images though – I recently published some articles (using WordPress, Yoast installed) that had featured images but they were not added separately to the post. All the images that were inside of the post are now indexed and appear in search, but not the Featured image.
Any ideas on why that might be the case? Or should I just wait for longer and hope that Google would pick it up?
I checked the Media settings and all images are set to Index/Follow.
Cheers!
Adomas
Thanks!
Adomas
Thanks for the post, Michiel — you make some useful points. To be honest, I’d never considered the alignment of images, but I think you could be right about aligning them to the left.
Thanks Michiel, valuable tips. I see some applied in my two sites and some not, so there will be a revision exercise. As far as alignment is concerned, I have been zigzagging (one left, one right). Will be looking at that.
Great guide to optimizing images. I would argue, however, that the image ALT tags used in THIS article aren’t necessarily optimized, as they simply repeat the page title. Have to practice what we preach!
Image and video can do such a great job that is to attracting people. It will helpful to get many visitors to our site. Once we get many visitors then it will automatically affected on ranking of website. Website get rank in search engine. Great article to read. I like it.
Image and photoshop is a must for every webmasters. I wonder if good quality image influence the site visibility.
This is not a simple article, but it is a most useful guide for both beginners and experienced SEO people. Thanks for sharing with us.
Much obliged for the post, Michiel — you make some valuable focuses. In all honesty, I’d never considered the arrangement of pictures, yet I think you could be right about adjusting them to one sid.
Hi,
Great Post :).
I have a question regarding articles with many pictures like tutorials for example, it may contain 10-15 pictures:
Is there any risk of keyword stuffing when we name the picture like this for example
Windows1.jpg , windows2.jpg, windows3.jpg etc…?
My second question, not really relevant to this topic, what is the template used for this website?
Thanks
Great post Michiel ! Image optimization is an essential part o f SEO & you are spot on with all the factors through which we can leverage images for SEO. Looking forward for more valuable SEO tips.