The pictures and images on your website, if properly search engine optimised, can enhance your web pages SEO. There are a couple of reasons why.
- The search engine spiders can’t actually see your images like visitors to your site see them. They have only the coding of your site to work with, and if that code doesn’t clearly detail (in text form) what your images are about, then they’ll give you no kudos for having them on your webpage.
The kudos on offer is improved rankings, which comes because of relevant images adding to the overall relevance a particular page has to the keyword or phrase being targeted, and relevance as I’m sure you know is a key factor in all search engine algorithms.
- Most search engines have an option that lets peeps search only for images. By doing SEO for your images, you increase the likelihood of the images themselves (rather than just the page they’re on) ranking well in their search.
TBH the traffic from image searches in itself is unlikely to directly convert to sales, however, it does enhance your brand awareness and can result in more backlinks to your site especially if you allow folks who find your images to use them in return for a backlink to your site.
What You Need To Do In The SEO For Image Process
We know that how fast a webpage loads is one of the factors that Google uses as part of their ranking algorithm, and each image that you have on a page on your site will slow down the speed at which that page loads. So, it’s important to keep the size of image files to a minimum. By resizing an image, and saving it in the appropriate format, you can make the file size literally hundreds of times smaller, often with only a slight compromise on the quality of the image, most visitors won’t even be able to notice the difference.
You should aim to keep the dimensions of your images within 640×480 pixels and to save images in either JPEG or PNG format – formats which automatically compress the original file size. If you have bigger images, or images in other formats, then manually resize and convert them using an image editing program (I use snagit). If your image editing software has some kind of “Save For Web” option then you should take a look at the file size once compress, as it will ‘usually’ reduce the size of the file.
There are plugins that will help your seo for images by loading your image only when needed, the plugin I use is called lazyload, it will also give you a litle edge with your page load speed time by only loading your images when they come into view on the webpage.
The name that you give an image file is included in the coding of the webpage that it’s displayed on, and search engines review every piece of that code when assessing the relevance of the page to the keyword being targeted. A random file name, such as image486g5.png, adds no relevance to the page at all, whereas a file name with the keyword in it does add relevance. You need to find the balance between adding relevance and keyword stuffing though.
Don’t name all of the images on a page like this – keyword1.png, keyword2.png, keyword3.png, etc., as it would be classed as keyword stuffing, which is a proper old skool SEO tactic that search engines will penalise you for. If you have a few images on a page, then include the keyword in some, but not all, of the image file names. As a guideline, I include the keyword in my first and last image file names on any one page. Also, for each image file name it’s recommended to:
- Make it a couple of words long.
- Use hyphens (-) between each word.
- Best to leave out stop words (a, to, the, etc.).
Image alt and title tags are pieces of HTML code that allow you to give a text description of an image. The text you write for the alt tag will only be seen by visitors to your site if, for some reason, the image itself can’t be displayed. The text you write for the title tag can only be seen by visitors to your site if they hover the cursor over the image. The purpose of these tags, therefore, particularly the image alt tag, is primarily for search engines, who use them when evaluating how relevant a webpage is to the keyword or phrase being searched for.
As with the image file name, to enhance relevance of the keyword being targeted on the page, your images should have image alt and title tags. FYI, you shouldn’t use exactly the same text for the file name, title and alt text – variation is good in all aspects of SEO. You can use the keyword in…
…a phrase or sentence, or use a synonym of it, to add some variation. Typically, the file name will be the shortest of the three and the alt text will be the longest.
Image SEO Examples
A simple example:
<img src=”file-name-including-keyword.jpg” title=”Title of the image including the keyword” alt=”Description of the image including the keyword”>
An image on a page that is trying to rank for ‘Psychology advice’:
<img src=”psychology-advice.png” title=”We Give Reliable Psychology Advice” alt=”Psychology advice from a resource you can trust”>
An image on a page that is trying to rank for ‘cheap China holidays’:
<img src=”book-china-holiday.png” title=”Cheap Holidays In China” alt=”Find affordable holidays in China”>
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