I’m often surprised to find that website owners neglect the optimization of the images inserted in their pages, when they don’t outright omit to insert one or two of them in their content.
As soon as their business is not based on the visual, the aesthetic aspect of the portal comes down to a home page and a coherent graphic charter for the rest of the site. The world of SEO in 2023 has consolidated a reality that some had already anticipated: artificial intelligence now plays a major role in the way search engines perceive images. Thanks to advanced algorithms, they can ‘understand’ the content of an image far beyond the ALT attribute. This reminds us of the importance of a selection of authentic images, aligned with the overall message of the site
Websites of lawyers, financiers, translators, copywriters and others in the tertiary sector located in office towers are good examples of this behaviour.
In fact, as soon as we don’t talk about:
- “products” to be sold (training, online advice, mentoring, coaching, etc.)
- E-commerce, travel
or professions for which examples of achievements where aesthetics and graphic appearance are important:
(Architects, builders, building craftsmen, designers, photographers, etc.) The photos are absent, very rare or not very meaningful
It should be added that the image engine is very popular with some Internet users looking for consumer products, holiday rentals or decoration. (read the article “first page Google“)
2023 saw the birth of a new approach to image optimization. While we used to think mainly in terms of weight and dimension, the current trend is moving towards the contextualization of the image. It’s no longer enough to simply compress; Each image must add undeniable value to the user experience, be relevant and tell a story in line with the surrounding content. This is how the image becomes a real SEO asset
The place of illustrations in the SEO optimization of a page
The presence and SEO optimization of images on a web page is an element that plays a real role in strengthening the relevance of your article, it actively participates in its visibility via the Google image engine.
Here are my top recommendations for making your images useful for your website’s SEO.
File name.jpg
Let your photo come out:
- your Kodak,
- a royalty-free photo site,
- from a paid source like Istock,
it must be renamed and given a short but descriptive name.
Care should be taken to use only lowercase Latin letters, without accents, without apostrophes, separating the words by a hyphen, possibly omitting articles and pronouns, Gender : nom-de-image.jpg
Tiffany Oberoi from Google confirms for skeptics that this practice brings a plus appreciated by the search engine.
The importance of page loading speed has never been more crucial than in 2023. With the emergence of 5G and ever-higher connection standards, users have become impatient. A poorly optimized image can quickly become a burden on loading time, taking a toll on the user experience. The art lies in the ability to maintain visual quality while guaranteeing technical lightness.
Photo size and weight in favor of page load time
Google has been communicating it for a long time and monitors it from the webmaster tool : the loading time of your page is an SEO criterion.
If there is one element that you can control in a simple way when it comes to the loading speed of your Web pages, it is the computer weight of the images, and this on two levels:
1) The physical dimension of the pixel illustration
Whether your images come out of your modern digital camera or your iPhone, (mine produces 3200pix X 2450pix images and weighing 1MB) they are far too large for a blog post, which rarely offers more than 600 pixels wide in a page with a side bar.
And if you plan to occupy only 300 pixels in the page, collapse it before inserting it into the library.
Inserting a page that is too wide requires adaptation work for its display to your CMS, pulls on server resources and slows down the display of the page.
2) The computer weight in Kilobytes
After the physical size, the computer weight of the photos must be reduced. The web does not care about the millions of colors that make up the HD photos that come out of modern electronic optical sensors, it is a question of bringing this back to reasonable proportions and sufficient for the eye to be seduced, with the display capacities of screens.
Photoshop element does this very well with the “save for web” function in the file menu.
Depending on the settings that your eye will find acceptable, the 6/9 color image reduced to 600 pixels wide in “high” quality will weigh between 30 and 75 KB, which is okay.
Photoshop Element “save for web” feature.
The Alt attribute
Originally created to display a description of the photo when the speed of the Internet connection did not allow it to be displayed, the alternative attribute of the image tag is now used by search engines to identify and index this content to “the series of pixels that is a photo”.
Avoid the sequence of clumsy keywords in the Alt, be fine, stay within the keyword, but written in an expression of 3 to 5 gently diluted words
The TITLE attribute of the image
The content of the Title attribute of the image is intended to offer an enriched user experience by being displayed as a thumbnail when the mouse hover over its pixels.
Not or very little taken into account for SEO, the fact remains that it is still a space of texts where it is possible to insert clear, readable information and that it does not cost much to fill it in as a matter of principle.
Who knows if Google won’t sneakily take it into account tomorrow morning… Get used to informing her.
Contextualize your images
The legend
When it is descriptive, the caption is text content directly affixed and associated with the illustration. These few words bring great credibility by contextualization.
The practice of putting copyright or photo credit on it is a mistake, we will reject this type of mention in the footnotes and we will prefer a more extensive description of the file.
The paragraph around the illustration
The place of the figure on the page has an importance that is rarely exploited.
If we assume that this file illustrates the point, that it provides a graphic complement with added value, then it is better that in the article “fruit basket”, the drawing of the Granny smiths is found in the paragraph that talks about apples, rather than in the one that describes pears or addresses fruit or agricultural generalities.
The sketch in question is an element of credibility for the page that must be used in the best place of the subject.
Linking on the image
Linking the photo to relevant content is a good practice.
This is usually done from the home page for the ergonomic side and to facilitate the visit of Internet users, but it can be considered more systematically.
On the other hand, I remove the link from the image to its source file when the file page does not add anything more in its isolated version of the text.
The icing on the cake
The latest study by searchmetrics even shows that the number of images weighs in the ranking…
MicroFormats
MicroFormats are intended to present a certain type of information that will eventually be used by search engines, in particular to enrich the results in the SERP.
Some are more useful than others, and their integration may seem more technical than the previous simple recommendations.
If schema.org give the list of “implementable” attributes, I prefer Sébastien Poudat’s tutorial to read in this article on developpez.com. It gives concrete examples of integration and shows how photos are used as a possible attribute in several MicroFormats:
- hRecipe
- hCard
- hProduct
- hMedia
- hListing
- hAudio
- hperson
If the first 3 of this list are often exploited, the others still remain confidential…
The weight of MicroFormats in referencing is proven in cooking recipes and products on e-commerce sites, for others it is as always a matter of time.
The presence of images on the page does not only have the advantage of airing out the subject, making it more pleasant and seducing the reader with a pleasant and explicit graphic, it also contributes directly to the relevance of the subject and thus to its referencing in search engines.
Want a handy tool for compressing images?
Read this great article on how to optimize images by aurone.com.
Off-topic but not completely useless.
- If you want to know who is using your photos without permission.
- If you want to trace back to the author of a photo.
- If you want to have an idea of the level of distribution on the web of the same photo.
Go to google image and drag and drop the reference photo from the office to the input field instead of searching there. The result is stunning.
In 2023, it’s fascinating to see that visual search is gaining momentum. People want quick answers, and a well-optimized image, coupled with relevant content, can often provide those answers better than a thousand words. We are at the dawn of an era where the phrase ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ has never been more literally true when it comes to SEO
Référencement-PME prends en charge les stratégies marketing des entreprises et PME dans la région de Montréal, pour sa plus grande fierté, depuis plus de 15 ans
