Running an online store is not as easy as it used to be since the competition is huge. You want to do many different things, including optimizing your images for SEO. Images can attract potential shoppers that use Google images and even reduce site load time. The problem is that most ecommerce site owners do not make any modification and cannot actually take full advantage of image optimization. With this in mind, here are the most effective SEO image optimization tips to remember.
Properly Name Your Images
The way in which images are named is vital for image SEO. You want them to be descriptively named and always use plain English. In most cases site owners just use default names given by the camera since it can take a lot of time to rename files. However, when you create keyword-rich names that are descriptive, you reap in the benefits associated with Image Search. Be sure that you use appropriate keywords and that you never use slang. Look in your Analytics account for ideas about keywords you could use.
Intelligently Organize Alt Tags
The alt tag is a text alternative to the image as the browser is not capable of rendering them. Also, as the image is rendered, the alt tag text is visible when hovering over images with your mouse. At the same time, this alt text is really important because of SEO reasons. You want to add the right alt tags to your ecommerce images so that you can get a better search engine ranking. No matter what you may think, adding these alt tags to ecommerce product images is one of the most effective ways to improve rankings.
Strategize Product Angles And Image Dimensions
A modern ecommerce trend is showing a product at multiple angles. For instance, if you showcase a car, it is a bad idea to add just one image. You want to add various different images with various parts of the car, including the interior and the sides. As you add extra images you also have to add the extra alt tags. Make sure that every single alt tag is unique for all product shots. Descriptions have to be added based on the alt tag. Potential searchers will find it much easier to locate the website. As an extra tip, be sure that you are careful with the large images. They have to be properly optimized.
Always Reduce Image Size
A really common mistake is adding images that are way too large in terms of size. This will make pages load so much slower than they should and your visitors are not going to have a great experience. At the same time, search engines will think that your site is not of high quality. Consumers normally wait around 3 seconds for websites to load on the devices they use. If this does not happen they normally go to another site. This is why it is vital that all your image sizes are lower, optimized for web use. Just be sure that quality reduction is not high since the images still need to look great. Aim for image sizes under 70 kb.
Proper Thumbnail Use
Most ecommerce site owners focus just on the images and completely neglect the thumbnails. This is not a good idea as you are missing out on some extra great SEO optimization. Unfortunately, thumbnails are often a page loading times silent killer. We tend to see them being uploaded without optimization so the size is way too large. In the case of sites like Shopify this is not a problem as thumbnails are automatically optimized. However, when you own your very own ecommerce site, this is something that should be manually done.
Always Use Image Site Maps
Most websites out there do not have an image site map and this is a shame since this is one of the fastest ways to take full advantage of how images can aid you rank higher. Google Image search will quickly index all your images. Make sure that you look at image publishing guidelines offered by Google since this helps you to get ranking even faster. Sitemap use will not guarantee Google image indexing but website optimization will surely be increased.
