Image SEO is one of the most overlooked parts of SEO. But; it can be a serious source of traffic for your site, and it helps you hold a good position in the organic results too.
Have you taken on a serious project? Let your designer design the site, your developer code it, your SEO specialist focus on the SEO, and you focus on the images.
What Is Image SEO?
Image SEO is the whole body of optimization work that gets the images on your site understood and indexed properly by search engines and ranked near the top of image search. It covers a good many technical and editorial elements, from file names and alt text to dimensions and quality. That work not only brings traffic from image search but also lifts your general SEO performance, improves the user experience and strengthens brand recognition.
Why Image SEO Matters
Marc had a huge idea: using images on websites. He shared the code on a mailing list. That is the day IMG said hello to the world. Around 1999, just as there is a craze for launching AI now, there was a craze for launching search engines. Nearly every engine apart from Google looked at meta tags, while in the early 2000s Google was indexing the whole site.
Rivals in a good many countries had already plugged their search into Google. Google was very good at both text and images, and today you could call it close to perfect. It analyzes the images on your site and serves users the most relevant data. Doing image SEO does not only mean reaching new visitors, it means reaching a highly relevant audience. When someone searches for a red winter coat and lands on your red coat from image search, that can mean a serious potential customer.
Have you ever lost yourself in a good image and studied it closely? For us as SEO specialists, that good image means extra seconds of time on site. Which is why we at Türk SEM take images in SEO very seriously.
How Do You Do Image SEO?
We treat image SEO as part of on-page SEO. Our on-page specialists interpret the image work and prepare the reports.
Choosing the file name: name the photograph “red-wool-coat.jpg” and make sure the file name describes the image.
Use alt text: make sure you describe the image properly. We covered that carefully in our alt text piece, and there is a tool on that page you can check your content with.
Check your site now with our alt text checker.
Sizing the image: this splits in two. The first is using the image at the right size. Put a 1000 by 1000 square photograph into a space 300 wide and 300 high, for instance, and that is the wrong way to do it. Resizing images and publishing them as WebP brings real advantages too. On a WordPress site you can use the entirely free EWWW image plugin.
Relevance: your page title, your subheading, your image name and your alt text should all point to the same image.
Why Original Images Matter in Image SEO
Treat what we described above as the basic components of image SEO, the essentials. What follows may look like a matter of degree, but it is not. Images being original, your own, brings real advantages in your Google rankings.
Original content is not only text. Video and images count as original too. Open a boutique shop and selling the products through your own photographs will reach more people than using the manufacturer’s images.
Note: Butik.net is a Türk SEM brand.
On Generating Images With AI
There is no clear definition from Google on this, so we asked Gemini and got this answer.
For now, Google looks at AI generated images through the same basic principles it applies to any other image: quality, originality, relevance, user experience and technical optimization. AI generated images that meet those criteria stand a better chance of being judged favorably by Google. Copyright, potential spam and future algorithm changes are worth watching too.
The best approach is to use every image, AI generated or not, in a way that adds value to your site, meets what users expect and follows SEO best practice.
Our own view at Türk SEM: I think real photography holds an advantage over AI generated images. If your site is in health or finance in particular, staying away from AI content keeps your business out of the hands of chance.
How Do You Use ImageObject?
If we are talking about image SEO, we have to cover ImageObject.
ImageObject is a structured data type defined by Schema.org. It is used to introduce and describe an image on a web page (a photograph, an illustration, a graphic) to search engines and other applications in more detail. It marks up various properties of an image, its URL, title, description, publication date, author, license holder and dimensions, in a standard format so search engines understand the content and context of the image better.
An example:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "ImageObject",
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Web Sitenizin Adı veya Yazarın Adı"
},
"contentUrl": "https://www.example.com/resimler/lezzetli-turk-kahvesi.jpg",
"datePublished": "2025-03-27",
"description": "Geleneksel Türk kahvesinin cezvede pişirilmiş ve fincanda sunulmuş yakın çekim fotoğrafı.",
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
"name": "Lezzetli Türk Kahvesi",
"url": "https://www.example.com/sayfa/turk-kahvesi-tarifi#gorsel",
"width": "1200",
"height": "800"
}
</script>Build an Image Sitemap
When you build a sitemap, do not skip your images: build one for images in your own software. A sample sitemap should look like this;
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org"
xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/urun/kirmizi-kaban</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>https://www.example.com/resimler/kirmizi-kaban-on.jpg</image:loc>
<image:caption>Şık Kırmızı Kaşe Kaban Ön Görünümü</image:caption>
<image:title>Kırmızı Kaşe Kaban</image:title>
</image:image>
<image:image>
<image:loc>https://www.example.com/resimler/kirmizi-kaban-arka.jpg</image:loc>
<image:caption>Şık Kırmızı Kaşe Kaban Arka Görünümü</image:caption>
<image:title>Kırmızı Kaşe Kaban Arka</image:title>
</image:image>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/blog/turk-kahvesi-tarifi</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>https://www.example.com/resimler/turk-kahvesi-cezve.jpg</image:loc>
<image:caption>Cezvede Pişen Geleneksel Türk Kahvesi</image:caption>
<image:title>Türk Kahvesi Yapımı</image:title>
</image:image>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/hakkimizda</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>https://www.example.com/resimler/ofis-ekibi.jpg</image:loc>
<image:caption>Çalışkan ve Deneyimli Ekibimiz</image:caption>
<image:title>Example Şirketi Ekibi</image:title>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>If you use a common CMS like WordPress, the well known SEO plugins will build an image sitemap. Yoast and Rank Math both have image sitemap sections.
Measure Your Image SEO and You Are Ready to Publish
The familiar page speed tools analyze image performance as well. The best known is the tool at pagespeed.web.dev. It will list any problems with the images on your site point by point. Other tools such as GTmetrix run their own tests on image optimization.
Ask Your Questions
If anything is nagging at you, put your site address in the comments and ask; we can look at the site and make recommendations. Join the discussion and keep it current. Stay well.
