GIFs have taken the internet by storm. They are everywhere, especially on social networks, where they have been widely used for years to respond to comments, show status, or just to joke. GIFs are a fun way to express yourself and become yourself almost in one language have. However, GIFs are more than just an entertaining format as they offer a lot of potential for communicating and conveying emotions.
GIFs are fun and allow you to communicate emotions with a picture. However, they can also influence the SEO of a website.
GIFs – which can be downloaded for free from many sites – are a series of frames that follow each other creating a soundless animation that is repeated in loops between 5 and 10 seconds. GIFs can be created from videos and have a maximum of 256 colors. This makes them brighter than video, but more dynamic than still images, and combine the best of each format.
GIFs are also used to illustrate blog posts and content, which can lead the user to wonder whether they are good or bad for SEO. This leads us to answer several questions:
-How does Google read GIFs? Google scans GIFs the same way it does traditional images, focusing on the factors that allow Google to share and rate the GIF in Google Images. With this in mind, when introducing a GIF into an article or content, it is important to consider which are the most important SEO positioning factors for images.
– Are GIFs good for SEO? GIFs, like other images, can be a positive positioning factor provided they are well configured, i.e. as long as they contain all fields such as description or alt title. Just like the good content if you like the GIF used and Eye-catching for the userIt will attract more traffic from search engines and, in this case, social networks too.
On the other hand, if the GIF is heavy and slows the page loading times, this is a negative factor. They’re also bad when the user removes text to place the GIF or when they don’t do the job Accessibility factors.
-How do I use GIFs to improve SEO? First of all, it’s best to use your own GIFs. If this is not possible, you have to adapt the file names, create an alt text and also a description. They should also be added to image sitemaps. In order for Google to scan and index the image well, it should be placed near a relevant text and from the top of the page. GIFs should be fast, mobile-friendly, and have a proper internal URL structure.
Finally, note that Google pays a lot of attention to the Core Web Vitals. Therefore, you need to pay special attention to the compression of the images and the size of the GIF. This can be done using online tools or Photoshop to make the compression as “clean” as possible.
