Google Image Search is more than just a digital image library. It is an educational, informative and entertaining platform that has been designed to satisfy the needs of today's internet users.
A traditional search engine such as Yahoo or Bing only allows you to filter your search by date, relevance, and various levels of specificity. Google Image Search on the other hand allows you to filter searches by both relevance and various levels of specificity, but also by size, color, orientation and the format of the content that you are looking for.
One advantage this provides is that it can save a lot of time for people who want to find a certain type of image - whether it be illustrations or photos - from sites such as Unsplash or Flickr without having to invest time in browsing through their databases.
![visual-search-2[1].jpg](https://broadhurst.digital/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/visual-search-2%5B1%5D.jpg)
Importance of Optimizing Images for SEO
In today’s world where having a website online is not enough to attract visitors, SEO has become a crucial factor in marketing. Optimizing images for SEO is an important part of the on-page SEO process because it helps the search engine to identify and index images.
The more accurate and relevant information about your images, the better they will rank in SERPs. The metadata that you provide for each image is what helps search engines understand what your image contains and if it matches a user’s query.
To identify images on your website that need to be optimised, you can perform a technical SEO audit which will identify images that do not have alt tags or are not suitably compressed to provide the best user experience and page loading speeds.
How To Optimize Images Properly For Google Image Search
It is difficult to rank for keywords on Google Images these days. There are three main tips to optimise images for Google image search, which are sizing, shortening URLs, and optimizing alt text.
In this section we will go over all the steps required to optimize your images for SEO.
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Optimise image placement by putting relevant images close to the relevant text
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Provide good context and make sure images are relevant to the content of the page
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Put the most important image toward the top of the page
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Don't embed important text inside images, particularly for page headings and menu items
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Use alt attributes in your HTML
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Use high-quality images as they perform better at generating traffic to your website
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Create high-quality content on your site
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Create mobile-friendly sites as users search on Google images from mobile more than desktop
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Use a good URL path for your image files
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Do not block robots from crawling your image files
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Use structured data where possible
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Add licensing information when using third-party images
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Apply image optimisation to ensure images load quickly
For a detailed account of how to optimise your images for SEO, check out Google Images SEO best practice.
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