Contents with text and relevant images (preferably optimized) are more engaging than contents with just texts alone. Image can affect 3 things on your site;

(i) Performance. (ii) Appearance. (iii) Scalability,

Despite the fact that you want to engage your readers with rich contents, you don’t want to do anything that will negatively affect your SEO ranks.

Even though the image is relevant and illustrative, if it is not optimized for search engines it will definitely affect your site page speed.
3 Popular Image Formats used on the Web

JPEG: It is short for Joint Photographic Experts Group. This acronym was coined in the 1986. Majorly, this format is great for displaying complex photographs that include a lot of colors.

PNG: It is an acronym for Portable Network Graphics. The number of colors supported by this format (millions of colors, by the way), are lesser than that of JPEG.

GIF: Graphics Interchange Format. Oh God, this format single-handedly transformed the meme world. They can be compressed too but they usually don’t yield desirable or excellent result.

STEPS FOR OPTIMIZING YOUR IMAGES FOR SEO

1. Image filename customization: When search engines are crawling your site, image itself is not indexed but the filename can be seen by the crawlers. With this, crawlers will be able to have an idea of what that image is there for.

Hence, it is very important to rename the images before uploading it to your site because it is also an essential SEO practice.

While you are renaming it, you can include the keyword of the page as the name (this is not compulsorily a must, only use it if it is applicable).

2. Image size compression: Compressing images may affect the quality negatively if it is not done with caution. How can you do this?
Personally, I use TinyJpg.

This limitedly free tool can compress your image by 86% and the resulting image quality will still be dope.

3. Alt tags for image: With alt tags, you can give a description of the images to search engines. Search engines check alt tags and consider this a metric for ranking pages since it is used to optimize the image.

4. Adding image to sitemap: Sitemap is another way to aid and hasten the rate at which search engines crawl and index your web pages.

What most sitemaps contain are links to the pages on the website, and when you add to map your pages, the images in these pages are also added. This is also a great way of optimizing your images

FINAL NOTE
In this piece, you must have learnt what image optimization is and how you can do it.

The benefits of optimizing your images can not be over emphasized; hence, more reasons why bloggers need to pay attention to it.
Are there any other methods you are currently using to optimize your images? Do well by telling us in the comment section below.

Read more at: https://seojagaban.com/4-tricks-optimize-image-search-engines/