Images are the page elements that help you bind the user with the page. People spend more time on pages that have better visual elements like images and videos. An image can be an infographic, an animated gif, or a simple product pic of an e-commerce website.
Images should also be optimized so that they can participate to get a better ranking for your website.
Techniques and rules for image optimization
1. Choose the right image format for your web page. Use high definition and clear images. You may use PNG format but it takes more time to lead this format. Whereas jpg format image loads quickly but with adjustable quality.
A new image format WebP is being considered by experts because of its fastest loading time.
WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster.
Google’s Article on WebP
2. Name of the image helps to get it searched. Define your image correctly. Create a good URL structure for your image.
3. Alt tag gives information about the image to the search engines and to the page visitor. Alt tag can be used to describe Bullets and lines. In such a case, you should use alt=””. Read more about the alt tag here.
4. Compress your image to reduce the size and loading time.
5. You can use structured data to feature your image. Though this is not guaranteed but increases the chances of being featured multifold.