On-Page SEO through Images
Well to improve overall SEO of your webpage you should take care of some things. Images may create big problems when it comes to On-Page. So, there are some practices you should follow to improve your On-Page SEO through images.
1.Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
Content Delivery Network strategy is very much trending nowadays. What it does is that it hosts your images for you so that the page load speeds and the bandwidth issue gets resolved. A faster page load speed is considered a plus point from an SEO point of view. But then there are drawbacks too.
Source - https://bit.ly/2Y6bnKa
We know that backlinks are the currency of SEO and when you use CDN then if someone gives a backlink to your image they are actually linking to the CDN. So you may lose a good amount of backlinks. Also, it may happen that while someone is visiting your website your CDN is down and the visitor bounces back because images don’t load.
So, as far as possible try hosting your images on your site itself! But then if you are a bulky website and you are visited by lacs of people every day then you do not have a choice other than using CDN. Some popular CDNs are CloudFlare and Fastly.
Source - https://bit.ly/2J9To1X
2. Leverage browser caching -
Well, this helps when your website is repeatedly visited by one user. Here the server can tell the user’s browser to temporarily store the images so that it does not have to reload the images on subsequent visits. This will reduce page load speed and improve your SEO. A plugin to enable this feature on your WordPress website is W3 Total Cache.
Source - https://bit.ly/2HyKhFM
3. Create Sitemap
The easier you make it for Google to crawl through your website the better it is from an SEO point of view. So a good practice is to create a sitemap for images wherein the URLs of all the images used by your website are stored at one place.
By doing this it will be ensured the Google crawls all your images and so it can show your images in its search result which will lead to more traffic on your website. To create a sitemap for your WordPress website you can use Yoast plugin and for others you can use Sitemap Generator and Screaming Frog.
4. Lazy Loading
This is a very good strategy to improve your page load speed. What it does is it will not load all the images of the website at once. It will load the image as and when the user reaches to the image. As users scroll down the images starts to load. By using it you can definitely improve your page’s loading speed. The WordPress plugin to enable this feature in WP Rocket.
5. Utilize Schema Markup
Schema Markup is a code that tells Google what is your data about. A typical example of schema markup is shown below -
The red underlined part here is the schema markup. It is good practice because it makes your SERP entry look more user-friendly. You should follow the same for images too. Google supports four markups for images and those are videos, recipes, GIFs, and products. You should definitely use schema markup to enhance your On-Page SEO.
So, till now you would have understood what major role images play in SEO. It can prove to be a game-changer if used smartly.
Do tell me your views and feel free to give suggestions. Stay tuned and have a nice day!
