How To: SEO for Images

When we talk about SEO, a lot of it comes down to the content that we provide and matching keywords to that text content. But you can’t just have endless blocks of text for a blog or website, your visitors will get bored quickly and move on to sites with a bit more color to their palette. A great way to break up all that text is with media, and a favorite form of media to use are images of course.

The great thing about images is that they can also be optimized with SEO. But, you ask, I thought search engine crawlers couldn’t “read” content like images, video, etc. Well no, they can’t, but what they can read is the information you provide with the image when you post it in your blog or on your site. Here are some tips to help you improve your Image SEO.

Improve Image SEO using the ALT Text

One of the things that search engines can read in an image is the ALT text that you provide with it. It’s the text that describes what the image is for basic HTML purposes. Not only does it need to be informative and descriptive, but it’s also a good place to put the target keyword for the page that it’s on. This can help boost your SEO ever so slightly, and lets you place your target keyword in one more place.

The File Name is Important

The file name you say? How can that possibly be important for Image SEO? Well it’s quite simple really, when a user does a Google Image search for a target keyword, any images with that target keyword as their file name will show up in the results. One of the biggest mistakes that content creators do is just leaving the file name as a string of numbers and letters. Use your target keywords as the image name and search engines will provide that image in search results. This is great for SEO as it provides another, trusted, link back to your site.

Optimize the Image for SEO

Basically, if an image is optimized, then it can improve the performance of your website. If your website is loading too slow due to your images, then your users will go elsewhere to a site that loads quicker. There are many tools online that will help you optimize your images so do a quick search to help improve your SEO.

Keep Content Relevant and Use Links

The content on the page should be related to the image that you provide with it. If the search engines see that your content and your images don’t match then the page may get considered as spam and get downranked because of it.

On the other hand, search engines love links. If you use your images as links to other pages or even just to that image, you will get a slight boost in your SEO as those links get ranked as part of your page.

Search engines make image searching a relevant search option, so with that in mind, Image SEO is just as important as any other SEO you do. By spending the time to optimize your images, you will generate better traffic for your site.