Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to ensure your website's visibility and attract more visitors. One of the most overlooked aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) is image management. By properly optimizing your site's images, you can significantly improve your search rankings and provide a faster, more enjoyable user experience. In this article, we'll explore best practices for optimizing your website's images to improve your SEO.

Choosing the right image formats

Choosing the right image format is crucial to ensure good quality while reducing file size. The most commonly used image formats are JPEG, PNG and WebP. Each has its advantages and disadvantages:

•  JPEG: This format is ideal for images with many colors, such as photographs. It offers good compression and acceptable image quality (1).
•  PNG: This format is best for images with uniform color areas, such as logos or screenshots. It also supports transparency (2).
•  WebP: Developed by Google, this format offers superior compression for both lossy and lossless images, as well as support for transparency. It is compatible with most modern browsers (3).

Compressing images

Image compression is essential to reduce the size of your images and speed up the loading time of your site. There are several online and offline tools to compress your images without sacrificing quality, such as TinyPNG (4) and ImageOptim (5). You can also use WordPress plugins such as Smush (6) or EWWW Image Optimizer (7) to automatically compress images when they are uploaded to your site.

Using adaptive images

Adaptive images are images that adapt to the user's screen size. They allow smaller versions of images to load for smaller screens, improving load times and user experience. To implement adaptive images, you can use the HTML tag "srcset" and "sizes" (8) or WordPress plugins such as WP Retina 2x (9) and Adaptive Images (10).

Optimize alt and title attributes

The "alt" and "title" attributes of images are important for SEO, as they help search engines understand the content of the image. The "alt" attribute should briefly describe the content of the image, while the "title" attribute can provide additional information. Be sure to include relevant keywords in these attributes, but avoid keyword stuffing (11).

Use descriptive file names

The file name of your images should be descriptive and contain relevant keywords. Search engines take file names into account when indexing images, so by using descriptive names, you can improve your SEO (12). For example, instead of using a generic file name like "IMG_1234.jpg", opt for something more meaningful like "smartphone-ecran-4k.jpg".