Are pictures really not helpful for SEO? I believe this is the doubt that many people will have.
The influence of text in SEO is still greater than that of pictures, but we cannot ignore the trend of image search. We often encounter customers considering the layout and the beauty of the screen, so we use a lot of pictures in the website to provide users with information, but forget that search engine crawlers can only understand "text" (code) , which is very important for SEO. What a pity!To take into account typesetting and SEO, engineers suggest to use pictures and texts in a complementary manner. If it is due to layout restrictions, you can use other blocks or pages that can put text to convert the content in the picture into text, so that search engine crawlers can know your These contents are also on the website!
In addition, the pictures and texts have these advantages:
- Enhance the user experience and make it less difficult to read
- Image search also has a chance to get high exposure
For SEO, how to optimize the picture?
Pictures are an indispensable part of our daily use of websites. Appropriate pictures can enhance the website and attract users' interest.
What are the benefits of image optimization? The main points are as follows:
- Improve user experience
- Shorten image download time and speed up web pages
- Make pictures and keywords related
- Increase the chance of image search exposure
1. Provide textual information
about the content of the image. When asked whether Google’s crawler couldrecognize the text in jpg or gif images, Google’s Gary Illyes responded "No" on twitter.
Although this question and answer does not mean that Google currently does not have the technology to recognize the text in the image, it can be speculated that the current Google search engine may not use the text in the image as a ranking element, and it is not like you and I can "understand" these image. After all, the official SEO guidelines also point out that as much detailed text information as possible should be provided in different ways for search engines to understand the image theme.
The following key points can be optimized:
1. alt text (alt text, alternative text)
alt text, or alt attribute, is used to create alternative text for pictures in html grammar. When the picture becomes invalid or cannot be displayed, the browser will display the alternative text. The example is as follows:
The syntax is as follows:
Alt text is one of the information that Google uses to determine the content of the image, and it is also very helpful for users who cannot see the image to understand the image. It can be said that it is the most important optimization item for image information.
When writing, you should write out the important features in the picture in as much detail as possible in short text, and add important keywords. Similarly, it cannot be done by filling in keywords.
If your picture is about the product you sell, you can put the product name and model in the alt text. In this way, if you search by name or model, your picture may appear in the image search results. If the photos are about different angles or details of the product, they can also be added in the alt text.
The above picture is an example, the example of alt text is as follows:
2. File name (file name)
When you have many product pictures, it is simple to upload pictures directly with the camera's default file name, but it is not helpful for SEO.
The file name can also give the search engine some hints about the content of the image. You can try to make your image file name more descriptive.
For example, bordy-wearing-a-blue-shirt.jpg is much better than IMG00050.jpg.
When search engines cannot find text suitable for image description on the page, they may use the file name as a summary of the image search results.
3. Text around the
picture On the page where the picture is located, the text around the picture, including annotations or picture captions, is the source for search engines to determine the content of the picture.
Therefore, it is very important to place the relevant picture in the proper place, and only use the picture when the content described in the text is relevant.
By the way, the grammar of the picture title mentioned here is as follows: when the mouse is moved to the picture, you can see the picture title display, as shown below:
4. Don’t put important text in the picture.
As we mentioned earlier, Google also recommends not to put important text only in the picture, such as page title, menu text, picture description text, etc., because not every Users can access these pictures, which is not easy for search engines to recognize. The best practice should be to write the text in the html syntax.
Many e-commerce websites like to make the product description text on the picture when making the product page. In addition to using different sizes of devices, the font size may cause reading problems. The amount of text referenced by search engines has also been greatly reduced, which is a pity.
5. Image sitemap (image sitemap) to
create an image sitemap (image sitemap) can provide information on the pictures on the googlebot website, help to improve the probability of the picture appearing in the image search.
2. Improve web experience
1. Every picture should have a reason. The
picture should appear to tell a story, help clarify some ideas or supplement content.
Images can help understand and remember, and are easier to attract attention than words. Appropriate pictures in a large section of text can bring the finishing touch.
Based on the above reasons, you may want to insert pictures in your article, but don’t forcefully include pictures that are not very relevant to the topic. Always remember to consider the relevance of the picture to the text topic.
2. Picture quality The picture quality
mentioned here is not only clear and unambiguous literally, but also about the value the picture brings.
As mentioned in the previous point, every picture should have a reason to appear on the web page.
Providing original and distinctive images can provide users with higher value, and at the same time, they will be more prominent in related searches.
3. Optimizing the size of picture files For pictures
used on general websites, the file size should be as small as possible without affecting the suitability for viewing.
The larger the picture, the longer it takes for the website to load. When the Internet is not so fast, users may not be patient to wait until the picture is displayed before jumping out.
You can use online image compression services such as TinyPNG to easily reduce the file size of the image, but remember to compare the compressed image to see if there are too many differences compared to the original image.
4. Use standard image formats.
In the selection of image file formats, use formats supported by most browsers such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP or WebP.
A. Do you need animation? If needed, GIF is the only universal choice.
GIF limits the color palette to a maximum of 256 colors, which is not a good choice for most pictures. In addition, PNG-8 provides a better compression ratio for pictures through a small color palette. Therefore, when you need animation, GIF is the right choice.
B. Is it necessary to use the highest resolution to preserve fine details? If needed, use PNG.
In addition to choosing the size of the palette, PNG does not use any distortion compression algorithm. Therefore, the produced pictures are of the highest quality, but the price is that the file size is significantly higher than other formats. Please use it with caution.
C. If the image asset contains an image composed of geometric figures, please consider converting it into a vector (SVG) format!
D. If the image asset contains text, please stop and reconsider. The text in the picture cannot be selected, searched or "zoomed". If you need to display a customized look (for branding or other reasons), you should use web fonts.
E. Do you want to optimize photos, screenshots or similar image resources? If yes, please use JPEG.
JPEG uses a mixture of distortion optimization and lossless optimization to reduce the file size of image assets. Please try several JPEG quality levels to find the best balance between quality and file size for image assets.
After reading the above content, you should have a better understanding of how SEO image optimization can be done. Of course, the above list is only some of the main points we have compiled for everyone. There are still many details that can be operated and discussed. You have other ideas about image optimization, please leave a message to discuss.
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