How to Optimise Images for SEO

Images are a crucial part of any website or blog. They help to enhance the visual appeal of your website, and they also help to make your content more engaging. However, images can also slow down your website if they are not optimized correctly. This can negatively impact your website's SEO and user experience.

In this blog post, we will explore how to optimize images for SEO.

How to optimize images

Compress Images

The first step in optimizing images for SEO is to compress them. Large image files can slow down your website, making it take longer to load. This can negatively impact your website's SEO and user experience. Compressing your images can help to reduce their file size without sacrificing image quality. There are several tools available to compress images, such as TinyPNG, Compressor.io, and Squoosh.

Next-gen formats

Next-gen image formats like WebP and AVIF offer better compression than traditional image formats like JPEG and PNG. Using next-gen image formats can significantly reduce the file size of your images, which can improve your website's load time and SEO.

Alt Text

Alt text is a brief description of an image that is displayed if the image cannot be loaded. Alt text is essential for accessibility, as it helps visually impaired users understand what the image is about. Alt text also helps search engines understand what the image is about, which can improve your website's SEO.

Use Descriptive File Names

When you upload images to your website, it's essential to use descriptive file names. This can help search engines understand what the image is about and improve your website's SEO. For example, instead of using a generic name like "image.jpg," use a more descriptive name like "woman-working-on-laptop.jpg.”

Use Captions

Captions are a brief description of an image that is displayed underneath the image. Captions can help to provide additional context for the image and make it more engaging. Captions can also help search engines understand what the image is about, which can improve your website's SEO.

Use Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a technique that defers the loading of non-critical resources, such as images, until they are needed. Lazy loading can significantly improve the load time of your website, especially if you have a lot of images on a page.

However lazy loading can affect you page’s Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in a negative way. Always make sure that images that are in the viewport during startup are loaded directly and aren’t lazy loaded.

How Mighty Image helps you optimize for SEO

Mighty Image’s feature helps you to significantly improve your website's load time and SEO.

Image Compression

Mighty Image uses advanced compression algorithms to reduce the size of your images without sacrificing image quality.

Automatic Format Conversion

Mighty Image can automatically convert your images to next-gen formats like WebP and AVIF, which offer better compression than traditional image formats like JPEG and PNG.

Image Resizing

Mighty Image can automatically resize your images to fit different screen sizes, which can improve your website's mobile responsiveness and SEO.

Components

Mighty Image components for Next.js, Vue and react help you with applying best practices

• Lazy loading
• Alt descriptions
• Captions

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