What Are The Common Mistakes To Avoid In Image SEO?

Story Based Question

You’re working on optimizing a website for a local bakery, and the goal is to drive more organic traffic through search engines. You’ve added some great high-quality images of your bakery’s products, but despite the effort, traffic isn’t increasing as expected. After reviewing the website, you realize you may have overlooked some image SEO best practices. What are the common mistakes you might have made in image SEO that could be affecting the performance of your website?

Exact Answer

Common mistakes in image SEO include using large image file sizes, neglecting image alt text, not optimizing image file names, failing to use responsive images, and not ensuring images are properly compressed. These mistakes can lead to slow loading speeds, poor user experience, and missed opportunities to rank in search engine results.

Explanation

Image SEO is a critical aspect of optimizing your website for both user experience and search engines. When images are not optimized properly, they can negatively affect the performance of your site, leading to slower load times, higher bounce rates, and missed search engine ranking opportunities. Here are the most common mistakes to avoid in image SEO:

1. Large Image File Sizes: One of the biggest mistakes is using images that are too large in file size. Large images slow down the loading time of your website, and slow load times are a significant factor in both user experience and SEO. Google prioritizes fast-loading websites, so if your images take too long to load, it can hurt your rankings.
2. Neglecting Alt Text: Alt text is an important SEO factor that describes the content of an image. Many people neglect adding alt text to their images, which is a missed opportunity for SEO. Alt text helps search engines understand what the image is about, improving the chances of your images showing up in image search results. It also helps with accessibility for visually impaired users.
3. Not Optimizing Image File Names: Default image file names like “IMG_1234.jpg” don’t provide any meaningful information to search engines. Optimizing image file names with descriptive keywords can help improve image SEO. Instead of using default names, you should rename your images to reflect their content, like “chocolate-cake-slice.jpg.”
4. Failing to Use Responsive Images: With mobile-first indexing becoming the norm, it’s important that images display properly on all devices. Failing to use responsive images can cause poor display on mobile devices, leading to a negative user experience and possibly hurting your SEO. Ensure you’re using the srcset attribute or the <picture> element to serve images that adapt to different screen sizes.
5. Not Compressing Images: Not compressing images can result in unnecessarily large file sizes, which slow down page loading times. Compressing images reduces the file size without sacrificing too much quality. Using tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim can help ensure that your images load quickly while maintaining visual quality.
6. Ignoring Image Formats: Using the wrong image format can also be a mistake. JPEG is good for photos, PNG for images with transparency, and WebP can offer smaller file sizes with similar quality for both types of images. Not choosing the right format for the type of image can negatively impact page load times and performance.
7. Overloading Pages with Too Many Images: While images are great for user engagement, too many images on a page can slow down the site and overwhelm users. Carefully choose the most impactful images to include, and make sure they’re optimized properly. Overloading a page with images that aren’t well-optimized will negatively impact SEO.

Example

Imagine you’re working on the bakery’s website and you’ve uploaded several photos of your cupcakes. Let’s go over how these mistakes might happen:

1. Large Image File Sizes: You upload high-resolution photos of the cupcakes that are over 4MB each. These large files cause the page to load slowly, frustrating visitors and potentially increasing bounce rates.
2. Neglecting Alt Text: You forget to add alt text for your images, leaving them without descriptions. As a result, search engines can’t understand the content of the images, and your site misses out on ranking for image searches related to cupcakes.
3. Not Optimizing Image File Names: Instead of renaming the cupcake photos with descriptive names like “vanilla-cupcake-icing.jpg,” you leave them as generic “IMG_3456.jpg.” This makes it harder for search engines to associate the images with specific keywords like “cupcake” or “bakery.”
4. Failing to Use Responsive Images: You upload a large image for the desktop version, but it’s not optimized for mobile. On smaller devices, the image doesn’t scale well, and users see a blurry or distorted image, which leads to a poor user experience.
5. Not Compressing Images: Since you didn’t compress the cupcake images, each image takes longer to load, which affects your page speed. This slows down the overall site performance, hurting SEO rankings.
6. Ignoring Image Formats: You used PNG format for the cupcake images, even though they’re photos and would perform better as JPEGs. This unnecessarily increases file sizes without adding visual benefits.
7. Overloading Pages with Too Many Images: You uploaded 20 images of cupcakes on a single page, each one slightly different, causing the page to be slow to load and visually overwhelming for users.

After recognizing these mistakes, you go back and:

• Compress the images to reduce their size.
• Add descriptive alt text like “fresh vanilla cupcakes with pink icing.”
• Rename the files to something more meaningful, like “chocolate-cupcake-frosting.jpg.”
• Ensure the images are responsive, adapting to both mobile and desktop versions of the site.
• Opt for the JPEG format for the photos, which reduces the file size while maintaining quality.

With these changes, your site’s performance improves, load times are faster, and SEO rankings are more likely to increase.

By avoiding common image SEO mistakes, you can enhance your website’s performance, improve user experience, and help boost your SEO rankings. Always focus on optimizing image size, file names, alt text, and mobile responsiveness to ensure your images are contributing to your SEO strategy.