There are many different reasons why you may wish to have various images from your website featured in Google Images. The indirect consequences of having more people see your images (and therefore, more clicks to the respective pages) are the biggest reasons for many, but various angles of search engine optimization and marketing will present other scenarios of motivation. As Google continues to optimize all elements of search, more people have inquired how to effectively and quickly rank their images in key search results. The basics are rather simple, but as always, Google’s algorithms present unique situations in which you must further optimize your images for the most success. Below, we will discuss the most important elements to consider when optimizing images for Google Images.

Size Considerations

In just about every field of the web, size and speed matter. Not only will your customers and visitors expect your website to be fast enough to keep their attention, but search engines like Google will be more critical of your placement in select search results if your pages load slowly or contain too much data. In the case of images, a balance of size and speed is vital to overall performance in Images search. When search engines are pinging your website, they will want to see images that are both high resolution and quick to load – simply shrinking an image to a relatively illegible size will not help boost your performance in Images search.

Tools That Can Help

A variety of different online options can help you take advantage of Google Images and boost your site’s exposure via images. One tool that has been helpful to many webmasters is the Website Testing Tools portal. This solution provides many different image optimization tools through the same website. Another popular solution is the proprietary PageSpeed Insights tool from Google – this utility can be used to quickly discern whether or not a page is loading at the opportune speed for front-page Images rankings. Several other blogs and websites also exist that provide insight and advice on how to better optimize your images for search engines.

Other Considerations

It is not just about image size and speed – ranking in Google Images requires several other smaller variables to be in place for ideal results. The names of each image definitely play a role in how and where they are featured within search. In addition to this, alt and title tags are crucial elements that will further dictate to search engines where your images belong and in which results to display them. There are also other variables that will affect how and where your images are displayed – one huge element is the content of your webpage, which is now assessed in order to determine further relevance for each image.

Conclusion

With search engines like Google already pinging your website on a daily basis, some slight modifications are all it takes to help boost your images’ performance in search. Optimizing speed and size is a huge element, while other attributes such as title and meta tags can help further propel your images to relevance. Various forms of page content will also play a role in how your images are featured, so be sure to place images on pages where their prominence is apt.