There are many SEO tips on the internet, from basic guide to advanced guide. Even though many topics have been discussed, but there’s always one or few topics that got overlook or underutilize. One of those topics is image. Not many people know how images can give advantage in search result or making it easy for searchers to find a website.
Lately, because of the universal search concept, search engine like Google, there’s table of images in the main result page. Not only is that, in some cases, tabled of images placed at the top of the page, a position where every website wanted to be. Beside, unlike text-based result, images on main search result are more stand out and can distract attention of users.
Without knowing, image result is as important as text result on Google SERP. For example, a women is looking for a recipe and naturally, she’s choosing the best looking dish in search, because from text result she might find it hard to figure out if the recipe that she picked is going to be a delicious dish. Another example is when a man trying to find instruction to build a working table. A text instruction might be acceptable for those who already expert in the field, but for amateur an image instruction can help a lot more than the text one.
Website page is not the only place that can be optimized by image; social media is also can gain huge advantage by using image. A study done by Kissmetrics said that by using image on Twitter can give a 19% higher click-through rate and 150% more retweet. A high quality image also can give a positive impact on Facebook Ad click-through rate. This means that a high quality and well-optimized image can bring huge advantage no matter where to put it.
Many studies said that readers and searchers tend to prefer content with images than without one. A theory called dual-coding said that human memory can collect both verbal and image-based information, but images are placed in memory in a more concrete way and can bring longer-lasting impact on consumers.
Before upload images, always make sure that they have top quality, attractive and eye-catching feature. For optimization, image size should be 320 and 1280 pixels, normal format size is recommended and make sure the ratio is between 4:3 and 16:10 in size, use appropriate file name of the image, file name shouldn’t be more than 4 to 6 words and a description of the image, include a copyright notice for practice, keep the size of image file is under 100 kb, so it can be loaded quickly. Add descriptive text in the alt attribute within the image tag.
Images can bring traffic, backlinks and many more advantage. Knowing this area can be an advantage because image optimization is an overlook and underutilize SEO practice. Even a small adjustment can bring a good impact in the future, so make sure to pay attention of image optimization in SEO.
