Well, your question is “What is the best way to create an image for blog posts which can help in SEO? Explain the procedure” Let’s discuss it.
A blog post usually contains text, and sometimes a lot of text. One may argue that if one has done a good job in putting up good quality, well-researched images, then it should be enough. But, in reality, simply publishing a lot of content on a blog post might not succeed to draw enough interest or satisfy a user.
The user wants more information in a short span, without processing much content or without struggling to read long informative texts. Images can be helpful in this.
Images can help a user understand and relate to our text so that they can evaluate the content’s overall relevance to them. Images can make our content exciting, more informative, interesting, and relevant. But must not be construed that our blog post must only be filled with images. Images, at best, are a supporting tool.
Images affect our web experience. Images help pages in better engagement with the audience. For SEO this matters because search engine algorithms pay attention to user experience reflected partially in the attention which images grab. Such experiences could be gauged through metrics like bounce rates, time spent per page, etc.
Therefore, images can be optimized to lend a helping hand in enhancing SEO works. For a search engine’s crawler, an image, its text (and in many cases, a possible hyperlink) means more than what a human eye can see.
Some of the best ways to create or use images for blog posts that might help in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) are as follows:
- Using high quality and relevant images: For the users to experience the best, high quality images should be used. The images used should be relevant to the context and the text. If the images are irrelevant, it may confuse the user. If the images are blurred or cropped, some information may be lost or it may kill the interest of the user.
Also, bad-quality images or irrelevant images leave a poor impression of the website. It becomes especially harmful when the website is commercial where pictures play an important role in engaging with potential customers.
Therefore, it should be ensured that the images are clear, high quality, and their relationship with the overall content and context is determined properly.
It is very important not to use copyrighted images, as it may have legal implications sometimes. But one is free to use images from online resources which provide such services for free. Investing time in using at least a single image per blog post might help a lot.
Also, since mobile surfing has increased considerably, good quality images optimized for mobile devices could help us better.
- Customise the image’s filename: It is an easy step, but still mostly neglected. Before adding any image to a website, some time should be spent on customising its filename. Give names which are relevant to the page, and includes one of our target keywords for the page.
For instance, if our webpage is about selling books, then our image could be named something like bookBrandname_1984Novel.jpg.
Visitors would not see the filename. But it helps us in providing a way for search engines to give out a little more information about our page’s content and the best keywords associated with it.
- Use of “alt” tags: The alt tags seen by the search engine crawlers. The tag remains invisible to most users. An alt tag text could be provided for every image added to our website.This helps users to know what the image was all about in case the browser is unable to load the image. The alt text helps signal search engines ascertain what a page’s content is about, of course, in addition to the other content.
It is necessary to update alt text for images, almost always. The alt text can contain primary keywords and some descriptions about the image. In WordPress, an alt text field is provided for the same.
- Finding the right quality-to-size ratio and compression of images.
There should be a balance between the quality and the speed of loading of an image. If the image file is large, it may take considerable time to load. This may discourage users to stay on the page, which is not good. Site Speed is an SEO factor too. Therefore, slower loading speeds are bad for user experience and SEO.
Website loading speeds could be improved by resizing our image files before they are loaded on our website. Optimum file size must be looked for, which doesn’t considerably affect the image’s resolution or its quality. A number of software exist which provide such resizing options.
Even after resizing, an image file size could be decreased further without compromising on the quality by compressing them. Various compression tools are also available for this purpose.
- Choosing the right format.
Basically, three main types of image files are there. Understanding which type to use can help us choose the best one for our needs. Brief information about the image format types is given below:
- JPEG: One of the most common file formats. This is because it is widely supported and it uses small file sizes. Image quality might not be as good as PNG files. In addition, this format doesn’t support the transparent backgrounds. So there might be some cases where a jpeg format file won’t work properly on expected lines.
- PNG: This file format provides high resolution. It also supports a text description of the image, which is a bonus for SEO. It is good to use PNG formats for images which are complex, intricate and may be containing text. The main shortcoming of using such a file format is that it is bulkier in size as compared to JPEG and GIF formats.
- GIF: This format isn’t as rich in colours as the above two, but it can serve as a good choice for simple images. This format supports transparent backgrounds and small file sizes.
For normal photos, JPEG formats serve the purpose well. For designed graphics or animated bits, GIF is more common. For higher quality and richer versions in the cases mentioned (in this paragraph), the PNG format is preferable.
[Bonus point- Humorous gif images could be placed at strategic places to break the monotony, especially on pages that host much text. The same could be done with jpeg images also. The point here is that images can come as a desirable break in the vast mostly monotonous text-filled pages. This also keeps the interest of the user alive on the page by entertaining or relaxing him a bit.]
- Adding images to a website’s sitemap.
Search Engines, such as Google, encourages website owners to submit a sitemap. This helps search engine crawlers to better crawl our pages so that they could be added to the vast index database maintained by search engines. Search engines allow us to include our images in the sitemap or alternatively, provide us with options to create a separate image sitemap (which could also be submitted).
Search engines can get clear information on images on a website through sitemaps. This increases the chances of the images being shown up in image searches. This further helps in increasing a website’s overall visibility in search results.
- Host images on our own site.
Images of a website could also be hosted on a third-party website in order to save space. But this practice also creates risk. It may be possible such a third-party website might be overloaded with traffic and therefore our images might fail to load. This might make visiting our website a confusing experience and leave a poor impression on the users.
Therefore, to avoid such an inconvenience, it is better to host images on our own website. This can be done by optimizing image file sizes and other strategies. This also ensures that images don’t slow down our web pages any more than necessary.
