Creating content isn’t just about the text, imagery is just as important when it comes to portraying the ideas on a page or in a blog post. It’s also an essential element in your SEO and should not be overlooked. Today, I thought I would share my quick guide on how to optimise images for SEO.
Table of Contents
How to optimise images for SEO
A content strategy should include graphics and photography as well as text, so keep the below items in mind when you are deciding on imagery to sit alongside your written content.
Create Unique, Relevant Content
Stock imagery is everywhere, and it certainly has its place in the digital marketing field, but you should try to avoid overusing it on your website. There is some evidence to suggest that using unique images over stock photos can have a positive effect on your SEO. Google’s former Head of Webspam, Matt Cutts, once stated that stock photos don’t currently harm a site’s search results. However, he did say, “That’s a great suggestion for a future signal that we could look at in terms of search quality.” As with your written work, images should be relevant to your audience. Images should reflect what the text is talking about and help your customers recognise the important elements in the conversation.
Don’t Steal
If you can’t take photos yourself or make graphics, never be tempted to take a photo from someone else’s site without permission. Make sure any stock photos you utilise are from a free site that allows commercial use of photos or you pay to have the photos. As someone who has fallen foul of this in my youth, you can get into hot water with photo companies and they WILL sue you, no matter how small a business you are. From an ethical perspective as well, we should ensure that artists such as designers and photographers get the pay and credit where it’s due.
The right format
Saving your photos and graphics in the right format will ensure your image remains a quality visual and will render correctly on people’s screens. PNG will produce better quality images but comes with a larger file size. A JPG may lose image quality, but you can adjust the quality level to find a good balance. PNG is a good option for images, while JPG is probably more suitable for photography. Test your various formats in different qualities to strike the right balance. Once you know what format works for you, write it down so your brand, style and admin practices remain consistent.
Compress images
As with format, compressing an image that is going on your website is about quality but it’s also about speed. By compressing images to the smallest they can be without losing quality will ensure your site has a better user experience from a visual perspective and a speed one. Google rewards faster sites so any small adjustments can add up to a big speed again across your pages and site. It is generally best if you can keep a webpage’s total weight under 1 or 2 MB in size, but since a page can be made up of code, text, images and videos you want to make sure you don’t use too many photos or ones that have a high file size or you’ll easily break this guideline.
Customise File Name
It’s a small thing to add and does not necessarily have a very large impact on SEO but making sure the file name is descriptive and includes your targeted keyword or phrase is good practice. If you are writing a blog post, it makes sense to create a main image whose filename is the same as the blog title and variations on it for other images on the page. Not only will this help search engines determine the relevancy of an image, but it will also make the admin of your website clearer and more organised.
Geotagging
Once you’ve created all your images, compressed and named them, you can do one more thing to boost their SEO potential; Geotagging. A geotagged photograph is a photograph that has been associated with a geographic position. Usually done by assigning latitude and longitude to the image, Geotagging can help boost local SEO.
Utilise Alt Tag
Now you have your images, you’ll want to add them to your site and on to a page. When you upload and place the image, the last thing you need to do is add the alt tag. An alt tag (alt attribute) specifies alternative text (alt-text) that is to be rendered when the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered. So if for some reason your browser cannot display an image, it will show the text to clarify what should be showing here. Not only is this essential from a technical perspective, but it also aids user experience for both able and disabled audiences.
Optimise Your Images for SEO
Optimising images for SEO is one of those small admin tasks that anybody can do to improve their site. You don’t need to have great design skills or be a tech wiz to implement the above ideas. As long as you understand the concept of keeping site speed fast and image information accessible for all, you know how to optimise images for SEO. If you do want further advice on creating content for your site, get in touch. Let’s grow your business together.