Sunday , February 16 2025

What Is Image SEO? Why Do We Need To Optimize Images In WordPress?

Image SEO is SEO optimization in terms of quality, content, image size, and image information related to the website. Image SEO increases the quality of content for users and increases website rankings on search engine results pages.

A beautiful, attractive image with a theme in a novel way, leaves an impression, helping users inspire to share your content. Image SEO is relatively easy, you just need to spend some time optimizing your images. This will make your website more competitive on search engine pages.

Image-SEO

What Is Image SEO?

Image SEO is SEO optimization in terms of quality, content, image size and size, … and image information related to the website. Image SEO increases the quality of content for users and increases website rankings on search engine results pages.

The purposes of image optimization:

  • Image SEO optimizes user experience: this will help users be satisfied when viewing content, not only bland text but this is also the most important goal.
  • Let Google understand your content and see you better: this helps us to rank high on the Google search results page

Why Is It Important To Optimize Images In WordPress? 

Any website is formed from basic elements: images, videos, text… To help the best user experience on your website, we need to optimize the current elements. presence on the page is essential. Optimizing images brings many important benefits:

  • Speed Up The Web Page

Accessing a website with a long loading time will cause discomfort and inhibition for users. This will make readers leave the website and never come back. In particular, Google has officially put page load speed into one of the criteria to evaluate websites.

  • Improve Search Engine Rankings 

When the image is reduced in size, it will help the website load faster, provide a better user experience, and always be appreciated by the search engines. Therefore, optimizing WordPress images is considered one of the most important factors in Onpage SEO, helping to increase your website’s ranking. However, to do that, you need to optimize other image properties such as alt tags, titles, captions, …

  • Help Your Website Take Up Less Server Space

Optimizing images saves server space, and makes your website lighter, making it run smoother. It also helps you reduce server costs if you are paying based on usage.

For the above reasons, you must have seen the importance of optimizing WordPress images.

How To Optimize Images For SEO

Optimizing images helps speed up page loading and is good for the user experience. Thus, it also helps increase the ability to rank for the Website.

Image optimization doesn’t just stop at image size and size. You need to add elements of the image such as title, alt tag, image file, and caption… to optimize for SEO. Because many users search by image results. Image search is viewed as a statement of current trends and certainly in the future by Google.

Therefore, WordPress image optimization is contributing to the success of image SEO, helping you to earn quite a bit of traffic.

Optimize Image Files 

Image SEO starts with the filename. We usually leave the image name as it is and then upload it to the website. As such, Google will not be able to understand the image if it has a meaningless name. Therefore, the image file name is one of the important factors in SEO.

The best way to name image files is in the following ways:

  • The image name contains the SEO keyword of the article that you want others to find when searching for the image on Google. For example, if the keyword is image SEO, you should not arbitrarily set it to dfghjk.jpg but should be set to image-seo.jpg.
  • The image file should not contain special characters such as “? #, @, /….
  • Images in the same article can have the same name but must be numbered 1, 2, and 3.

If your article has many images and is difficult to name, we just need to name it so that it accurately describes the meaning of the photo. Not all images are inserted with keywords, so it will be unnatural and easy to be penalized by Google for keyword spam errors. We only need one or two photos without keywords.

Naming each image is really difficult if your article has many images. However, your efforts will be rewarded when you get to the top of Google.

Optimizing Other Properties After Uploading To Media 

The title of the image will be displayed when the user hovers over the image, which will help readers know better about the photo and clarify the topic of the article. While it is not important for SEO, it is very important for user experience.

And the alt text is very important, so don’t leave it blank because it will help Google know what your image is about. This will evaluate the content of your website.

Alt-text is the text that will be displayed instead of an image when it is not displayed if something goes wrong with the image. The alt text should have the main keyword or related keywords and not use spaces “-” between words. ALT tags should be concise, and targeted, and should not be stuffed with keywords in the ALT.

Optimizing WordPress images for SEO standards

  • ALT tag: alternative text when the image is corrupted to help Google “read” your image.
  • Title: you need to check again before uploading, WordPress will take the name of your image file to set the title for that image.
  • Caption: you can add captions to your images if needed. The caption is shown below the photo in the article for users to read and understand more about that photo. People often pay attention to headings, captions, and images when skimming articles.

Therefore, you should optimize good captions for important images to attract readers. However, it is not necessary to caption all images. Small tip: in this caption, you can internally link related articles, services, and product categories.

Prevent WordPress From Generating Different Sizes 

This is what you need to do after installing WordPress. By default, WordPress will automatically create different-sized copies including media, large, and thumbnail.

To prevent this: In the admin section, go to Settings > Media > then set all default sizes to 0. Then click Save Changes to save.

optimize-image-in-wordpress

Not only WordPress but also themes and some of the plugins you are using are also silently creating image copies. To check the image sizes generated by the theme. Go to wp-content > themes > theme-theme > functions.php.

Open the functions.php file > press Ctrl + F > type add_image_size. Each of these lines corresponds to a version of the image that will be created. Then you delete any size that you don’t need and click Save to save the changes.

How To Delete Unused Photos 

As above, when uploading 1 photo, up to 10 copies will be created. If you only use 1 size in posts and thumbnails, what should you do with unused images? To delete those photos, you can use the Media Cleaner plugin.

To enable the recycle bin feature for Media Library, you can add the following line at the top of the wp-config.php file: define ( ‘MEDIA_TRASH’, true );

After activating the plugin, go to Media > Cleaner > Reset > Start Scan. After you scan, a list of unused images will appear if there are > Delete All.

Note: Back up database and /or upload folder before deleting. Temporarily deleted files are located in the /uploads/wpmc-trash directory. When checking, you can delete it or press restore.

The Reasons Why Images Should Be Optimized In WordPress 

Improve Page Loading Speed 

You also know that images are considered one of the heaviest content in the article. Because it takes a long time to load and usually shows up last. An article with a lot of images that are not well optimized will be heavy. You may have to wait a long time for the article to finish loading.

Even if the content you write is really good and brings many benefits to the readers, if you keep them waiting for a long time, they will also leave your website because they are not patient enough to wait.

Boost User Experience 

If a 2000-word article without any illustrations. Or are you afraid that many images will slow down the website? If so, surely no one would be interested in reading the entire article. Therefore, you need to present it scientifically and vividly and easily understand it with a 2000-word article!

In addition, readers will stop longer to see that image. You also know that the longer the user stays on the Web site, the better.

Increase SEO Score Of The Article 

Google is like readers, if users like vivid articles with many descriptive images, so will google. Your article will receive a lot of favor from Google, so it will increase the user experience and help you get many SEO points.

Articles with slow speed, or not yet fully loaded, often have extremely low SEO results. It rarely appears on page 2.

Achieve Good Image SEO Score On Google

Many people only focus on SEO for articles and do not know what image SEO is. Meanwhile, the demand for image search is very large. Especially in the fields of beauty, and fashion, … the search volume for product images is very high.

The trend of image search is growing, even Google allows you to use any image to search. You just need to drag that image into the Google search box, and you will get hundreds of similar images returned. Don’t miss any opportunity to appear first in the search results!

Criteria For Google To Evaluate And Rank Images

In order for images to rank high on Google, you need to meet the following criteria:

  • Images need to be optimized for SEO standards
  • In the article, it must show and supplement the article content to match the user’s query when searching.
  • The previous images need to be optimized for SEO
  • High traffic to the photo

Image Source 

You can take the pictures you want yourself, no need to worry about copyright issues. If you can’t take a photo yourself, you’ll have to Google. You just need to go to Google and type the name of the image you want to check, and there are millions of images displayed. However, the images on it are copyrighted, so care should be taken when using them. To be on the safe side, you can cite the source.

Number Of Images Per Post

Google always appreciates and encourages articles with images and videos to make the article more vivid and easy to understand.

An article of about 1000 words with at least 3 pictures or more helps users not to get bored when reading. Depending on the content of each article, there will be more or less, and do not abuse inserting too many images for an article will slow down the page speed. This will not bring much value to the reader.

The Image Format

After you get the image, you need to check and convert the image format. Currently, there are 3 commonly used image extensions on WordPress sites today: png, jpg, and gif.

  • JPG or JPEG

This is the most common format for Web images. JPEG is the best choice for the need to save the image with a small file size, for example when you use to upload it sent via email or online. Image quality is degraded as the size is reduced, so you don’t need very good quality images like news articles, you can use JPG.

  • PNG

This is considered a good format for Web graphics. If you want the image file to be small in size but still maintain a clear quality for customers to refer to, you should use PNG images. Or you want to use images with transparent backgrounds such as logos or icons that are superimposed on other images, then PNG is the format for you.

  • GIF

This is an animated image, however the worst choice for Web graphics, but its file size is small, and it loads very quickly. If you want to use animation effects you can use GIF, which is a good format for Clip Art images.

Compressed WordPress Images

You need to pay attention to compressing WordPress images to balance quality and size. Because if you compress more, the quality will be affected. If you can reduce the image size as much as possible, it should not affect the image quality too much.

The best-compressed image size is under 100kb and up to 150kb. If you exceed that number, you should think about replacing it with another image or accept the article with a few large images.

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