What is the concept of seo images? How do you use it to get traffic to search results?

If you are the owner of a website or blog on WordPress or others, SEO optimization for images is one of the useful factors that help you improve your site results, appear in the Google Image search engine and get more traffic.

In this article, we will explain to you what the concept of image seo is and how you can benefit from it for the appearance of your website images in the Google search results for images, as well as offer you the best tips that help you improve the "SEO" of your website images. This is done by using the image title (Image Title) and the alternative text of the image (Alt Text) in the correct way.

What is the concept of seo images?

Today, visual content (image, video, etc.) is one of the things that are widely used in websites and blogs and have a significant impact on improving search results and increasing visitor interaction with the site, and here comes the concept of SEO for images, in which you take some steps that help you improve Search results for images, in order to appear in the Google Image search engine.

You can improve search results for images through a set of techniques that help you reduce the size of images, as well as make the correct use of image names, image titles, alt text, caption words that express images, and more.

Why should you care about seo images?

If you are looking for more traffic or more sales, you need to know how important image optimization is.

Faster site loading time, one of the very important things that affect the speed of your site, are the images. Therefore, you should work on reducing the size of your images to get a faster loading time. We also talked about the most important measures to increase the speed of your WordPress site.

Ranking higher in search engines: A large percentage of searches today are done on the search engine for images. Optimizing images will help you appear in better results in the search engine for images and thus you will get more traffic and sales

Better user experience, when you display the image elements correctly from the image title and alt text (which appears when the images are not loaded) and compress the image size, it helps you to provide a useful user experience for visitors in discovering the content of your site.

How does alt text for images help improve SEO?

Alt Text is the text that appears to the user if the image does not appear, as in this example:

There are several reasons that lead to the image not appearing or opening, there may be problems with the download or the images have been turned off in the browser to increase the connection speed or to help the blind who use screen readers. It helps users to know what type of image it is and what it contains.

When Google wants to understand what an image is and what it is, it relies on alt text for it; So you have to write it appropriately, because it helps search engines better understand and index the images.

How do I write a suitable alternative text?

In order to help improve search results, you have to write your keywords inside the alternative text in an appropriate way, in order to help search engines index the image correctly, paying attention not to write keywords in an exaggerated or stuffy way, because this will not help you.

For example, if you write the alt text for one image in the following form: profit from the Internet, profit from YouTube, profit from surveys, earn from the Internet, work from the Internet, profit 2021, Arab and international profit sites.

If you do not open the image, the user will see all these words exaggerated, and this will not express exactly what the image is.

Better yet, write something that expresses the image, and includes the keyword without any fillers. For example (the best ways to profit from the Internet 2021), in this case, you have written words that help search engines understand the image, and help understand what the image contains when it cannot be opened.

Writing alt text on your wordpress site

If you own a WordPress website or blog, you can click on Add Media Files

Then a window will open for you to choose the image you want to download, and on the right, you will notice the Alt Text box.

Note: You can leave the alt text field blank, if the image is an ornament or is a decorative element in general.

How does an image title improve image seo?

The image title is the title or speech that appears to you when you hover the mouse over the image, and this title is not shown to users in the event that the image cannot be opened as the alternative text, and the image title is not considered one of the things that helps you to improve the seo of images Or ranking in search engines in general, can be overlooked.

The image title differs from the image name, because the image name is a fixed name that cannot be changed, such as (learn-seo.png), while the image title can be changed from within WordPress and write any title you want, for example (Learn SEO).

Add Image Title to WordPress

From within the WordPress editor, we click on the “Edit” button to edit the image

Next we choose Advanced, and type the appropriate title for the image in the Title attribute field.

Then when we move the mouse pointer over the image, the title of the image will appear.

Does the name of the image affect the improvement of SEO?

In general, the correct file name can help in a better understanding of the images and thus affect the ranking in search engines. When search engines crawl within the site, they do not read the site as the user does, but rather see the existing code and crawl inside it.

Therefore, it is recommended to write the name of an image that expresses its meaning, in order to help archive the site and appear in the search results, as well as it is preferable to write the name of the images and put a sign (-) between each word and word, such as (ready-identify-maps) in order to facilitate search engines Recognize and classify the written word.

It is also important for the name of the image, that once the image is uploaded to your site and published, this name will be merged with the link (URL), so not naming it correctly will not help you to rank and understand it by search engines.

You can click on the image, to show you how the link looks combined with the name

Note : You must pay attention to writing the name of the image in the appropriate manner before uploading and uploading. In case you forgot to do this you will need to delete the images and upload them again or if you own a WordPress site, you can use the Enable Media Replace plugin which allows you to rename images from within WordPress, without deleting them.

Also, in general, you should avoid naming the image with names such as (Image), (Pic), (Image), numbers, or the like, as this will not help Google understand the true meaning of the image.

Also, avoid using the (_) sign, if you name the image (location_map), Google will read it as follows (location-map), and this will not help improve the seo of the image, and also do not stuff the keywords in the name of the image, but it is enough to write clearly expressing the image.

Improving image seo in wordpress

WordPress gives you many features and features as well as many plugins that help you improve the SEO of images without the need for technical or programming experience. First and when you insert an image by clicking on add media files.

A new window will open for you to download the image you want, and on the right side of the screen we notice 3 options:

Alt text: You can put the keyword appropriately (as we talked about above)

Explanatory words: you can put an explanation of what the pictures are or you can write the same words as in the alternative text.
Description: An actual description of what is in the image. For example, you have a picture of a white rabbit; This means that we write here (a white rabbit)
. WordPress also provides you with several plugins that help you improve search results in general, as well as improve the SEO of images. For example, Yoast provides you with many options that help you improve images, by examining your article from several aspects:

Are there pictures in the article?

Have you added the data for the images (alt text, captions and description)

Did you type the keywords into the alt text or image data?

Checking the percentage of keywords written in the image data

As in this advice from Yoast’s addition tips in one of the articles, which recommends you to put the keyword text in the alt text, and for more read the detailed explanation that we prepared earlier to explain the use of Yoast SEO.

Top tips to improve image seo

If you own a website or blog on WordPress or others, there are some tips that help you improve search results for images and therefore for your site in general.

1- Using the right image: The user experience is one of the most important things that Google looks for, so you should use images when there is a need for it and when they help you provide a better explanation for visitors as well as high quality images.

2- Writing the alt text for images: the alt text and the name help to improve the seo of images, as well as the understanding of Google and search engines for images.

3- Writing the appropriate image names: In order for search engines to understand your images correctly, you must write a name that expresses the nature of the image, in order to be better archived and categorized. 

4- Compress images to increase page load speed: Website loading speed is one of the most important ranking factors in search engines, you have to work on image compression, so to increase page load speed and create a comfortable user experience for visitors, and we have talked before about how to compress the size of your site images without losing the quality.

5- Choose the appropriate extension for images: most of the extensions that you can work on today are (PNG, JPEG, WebP). PNG will give you better images but with a larger size, while JPEG will be at a smaller size.

The WebP format also gives you a high quality image and a small size, but it is not supported by all browsers, works on (Chrome and Firefox)

6- Copyright: There are many images on the Internet, which are used a lot in websites. Make sure to use royalty-free images and it's best to design unique images for your site as this may affect your site's ranking using an image that you don't own the copyright to.

7- Pay attention to the page title and description - Page Title & Description As announced by Google, it uses the page title and description as part of its image search algorithm. 

8- Determining the dimensions of the images: One of the things that helps you to provide a better user experience is to determine the dimensions of the image (width and height), which in turn will help you to get a better ranking in search engines.

9- Mobile compatibility: One of the most important things that helps to improve and arrange is mobile compatibility, due to the large number of users who search for images by mobile, and we previously talked about how your site is responsive and friendly to smartphones.

10- Adding images to the sitemap: One of the things that helps search engines crawl and index your images well is adding them to the sitemap.

In the end, today the concept of image seo is one of the important things that website owners should not neglect. You must make sure to improve the search results for your site images in order to get a better ranking in image search results by applying the tips that we explained in the previous lines, including naming images correctly. And then compress the images to reduce the size and increase the speed, as well as choose the appropriate extension. Then you have to write the appropriate alt text, take care of the metadata, add the images to the sitemap and all the elements that affect the image label.