Optimising your website images for the search engines is not rocket science. It’s actually very simple. If your business website showcases unique pictures, graphics and/or images, this 3 minutes reading can be worthwhile.
The need for Image SEO
Image search engine optimisation is absolutely a must for photographers, graphic designers, manufacturers and all those business websites that have a “portfolio” page or a product showcase.
In fact, Image SEO doesn’t increase your website ranking for “normal” Google web searches. However, how many times have you used “Google Image Search“? With Image SEO, just as with web search, you can dramatically increase the likelihood that your images, pictures or graphics will be returned in those image results.
So, here are 3 tricks to boost your website images SEO.
1. SEO your image filenames
99 times out of 100, your images or pictures are named “001.JPEG”, “XYZ-0001.JPG” or, even worse, “untitled.JPEG”. Trick number 1: give your images an informative, descriptive and detailed filename.
Placing keywords in the image filename can help Google understand the subject matter of that image. Example: ranking a product image with a filename “rose-flowers-dublin.JPG” is much easier than “IMG-0004.JPG”.
Each website image should have a descriptive filename. This will basically boost your image visibility from 0% to something that is definitely not 0% anymore!
2. SEO your image ALT text
“ALT text” stands for “alternative text”. It is used to provide relevant text content when the image cannot be “seen” by internet users. This can happen if some browser doesn’t allow image rendering, internet connection is slow, etc.
On top of user-experience, the ALT text is also very useful in terms of SEO. In fact, it provides useful information to Google, for the same reason: it helps search engines understand the image’s subject matter.
Trick number 2: use descriptive image ALT text (don’t overfill it with keywords though).
3. Have relevant page content
The website page the image is on, and its text content (as well as the image filename, ALT text, caption and title), help search engines understand the subject matter of your image.
If you have a picture of “Rose flowers” on a page of your website that is about “Delivery policy” you will be basically confuse Google when trying to rank that image.
Trick number 3: surround images with relevant text.