Metadata: Using HTML And EXIF Data To Your Advantage
Contrary to popular belief, images do have text that can be adjusted to suit search engine needs, it’s just all hidden in the source code of your website. Although much of this text is never seen by your end consumers, it is vital information to help search engines crawl through your page. Think of it like a roadmap that tells Google why your image is important.
HTML is the language that tells your browser how to display your page. The following tags are the most common attributes you should consider for your images:
- Image Name: The image name should be between eight and 16 characters in length, enough for two to three keywords that are relevant to your image.
- Alt Text: The text that appears when an image file can’t be loaded, and what screen readers for visually impaired people will read to the user. It should be short and descriptive to give a good idea of what is in the image.
- Title: The text that appears when you hover your mouse over the image. It is not used for SEO, but is not difficult to include and is nice for user experience.
- Figure and Figcaption: The figcaption is attached to the figure element, which allows for the addition of a caption to the object in question. This can be one of the most important elements, as it is one of the only visible tags to an end user all the time.
In addition to this, EXIF data is used by cameras to store data within the photo itself, including date, time, camera model, camera settings, geolocation, etc. All of this is useful for SEO, and some software like GIMP or Photoshop allows you to adjust or add certain elements of EXIF data for optimization.
Choosing The Right Image File Types For Your Needs
There are a lot of cases where people don’t even think twice about what image format to use, and it often highly depends on what you need from an image.
- JPEG (or JPG): is the most common format that should be used in most common cases, as it provides the highest quality image.
- PNG: files are excellent options when you need transparent graphics or icons.
- GIF: is terrible for SEO and should be avoided whenever possible, reserving it only for when short animations are absolutely needed.
- SVG: The figcaption is attached to the figure element, which allows for the addition of a caption to the object in question. This can be one of the most important elements, as it is one of the only visible tags to an end user all the time.
- WebP: is a Google-created compression format that is generally the best format when optimizing for Google as a replacement for JPG or PNG files. Google has been known to favour their products in their search algorithm.
Image Compression
This is the bread and butter of image optimization. It’s common knowledge that smaller image sizes make pages load quicker, meaning images should be compressed whenever possible. Most compression results in changes undetectable to the human eye.
There are two types of compression you should be concerned about:
- Lossless image compression usually only involves removing metadata from an image, and should only really be considered if you are not using this data for SEO.
- Lossy image compression loses some quality of your image, but is generally small enough to go unnoticed in most cases.
While you should find a good compromise between file size and quality, compression should be the priority for the reasons listed above. Of course, always use your best judgment.
Load Your Images Only If You Must
Image compression is a great start if you want your pages to load faster, but what if you don’t have to load some images at all? It is often recommended to use a method called “lazy loading” that only processes images once they appear on-screen. Be careful though, as you should only really do this for images that are not your main ones.
All of these tools are invaluable for proper image SEO. If it seems a little daunting, not to worry!
BreezeMaxWeb is always here to help
our clients with a wide variety of
SEO services in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Calgary and across Canada! Get started ranking your pages today!
