The following factors will help you analyze various dimensions so as to find the optimal settings for your images.
1) Use Image Captions
An image caption is the text description that appears below the image. The main purpose of the caption area is to describe an image. It can also be used to provide credit links. Even though image captions are not related directly with search engine rankings, there are important reasons for adding them to your images.
Image captions play the role of telling your readers what you imply by using a particular image. In so doing, readers will not get the wrong idea or make wrong conclusions. So you need to provide enough information on your image caption area so as to avoid wrong interpretation or impression.
Creative and intelligent image captions will spark and capture the readers’ interest. This means that readers will spend more time on your website and read the full article. Consequently, your site’s bounce rate will reduce. This will boost your site’s SEO score, thereby increasing the chances of your images getting a higher position in search engine results page.
2) Choose the Right Image Format
The three main types of image formats are JPEG (JPG), GIF and PNG. JPEG is more popular and thus it is used often than other formats. JPEG is the best format for digital photography. Even though PNG format is not as common as JPEG, it is amazing in terms of compression. Images with PNG format do not lose their quality even after resizing or multiple editing. On the other hand, GIF format is commonly used with small images.
JPEG is the best image format to use for your images. This is because it is smaller in size compared to all the other formats. This implies that images with JPEG format will load faster.
3) Create an Image Sitemap
Sitemaps are very important as far as indexing by search engines is concerned. Create an image sitemap and add it to your webmaster tools account. Ensure that you do this for the various search engines. By doing this, you will allow search engine spiders to crawl and index the images on your site. You can easily accomplish this using a sitemap plugin. Once you submit the sitemap, the images on your site will be crawled and then indexed in search engines. If you do not upload images on your site, then you are good to go without an image sitemap.
