Satellite Image classification provides information about land use land cover (LULC) and this is required in many applications such as Urban planning and environmental monitoring. Recently, deep learning techniques were applied for satellite image classification and achieved higher efficiency. The existing techniques in satellite image classification have limitations of overfitting problems due to the convolutional neural network (CNN) model generating more features. This research proposes the optimal guidance-whale optimization algorithm (OG-WOA) technique to select the relevant features and reduce the overfitting problem. The optimal guidance technique increases the exploitation of the search technique by changing the position of the search agent related to the best fitness value. This increase in exploitation helps to select the relevant features and avoid overfitting problems. The input images are normalized and applied to AlexNet–ResNet50 model for feature extraction. The OG-WOA technique is applied in extracted features to select relevant features. Finally, the selected features are processed for classification using Bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM). The proposed OG-WOA–Bi-LSTM technique has an accuracy of 97.12% on AID, 99.34% on UCM, and 96.73% on NWPU, SceneNet model has accuracy of 89.58% on AID, and 95.21 on the NWPU dataset.