SEO Best Practices When Using GIFs

What are the pros and cons of dynamic GIF content? Are GIFs good or bad for SEO? Here’s everything you need to know when using GIFs in your web content.

From BuzzFeed listicles to Twitter clapbacks, GIFs (short for Graphics Interchange Format) are part of the language of the web.

If you search through Google images or through Giphy, one of the largest GIF aggregators, you can see a massive variety of GIFs on display from all over.

An animated GIF (pronounced both as “jif” and “gif”, and arguing about the pronunciation is a surefire way to start an argument online) is a type of media file that can be inserted into personal messages as well as public content online.

A quick Google search defines GIF as “a lossless format for image files that supports both animated and static images,” that rose in popularity during the 1980s.

GIFs can express emotions or scenarios in a more dynamic and entertaining format.

GIF History

Steve Wilhite at CompuServe built the GIF to save memory when displaying images.

Wilhite’s team figured out a way to serve these images using a compression algorithm and limiting the number of colors.

The algorithm worked by identifying repeating patterns, and it made GIFs great at creating high-performance photorealistic images.

Since multiple versions of the image are included in the file, you could string those images together to create a looping video.

The GIF had a storied history after that; Unisys Corp, the company that owned the GIF algorithm, started charging royalties for GIFs in 1995 – and the patent didn’t run out until 2003.

Google images came around in 2001, but didn’t get an explicit feature to search for GIFs until 2013.

In 2019, Google added shareable GIFs to search results.

How Does Google Crawl GIFs?

Google seems to, at this point, read GIFs in the same way it reads all other images – just with a greater focus on being able to search for, and share, them through Google Images.

Google Image optimization techniques are the way to go to make sure your GIFs get crawled, parsed, and indexed.

Are GIFs Good for SEO?

GIFs can be good for SEO in the way that all well-crafted images can be good for SEO – they can drive clicks and keep people engaged on a page.

Read more: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/