We look at three ways you can optimize images for better SEO. Image optimization is one of the most overlooked aspects of SEO, user experience, and accessibility.

1) Rename your image files to include keywords. Many times, we’ll see people upload images with file names like IMG_1034.jpg — but that doesn’t give Google much information about what is depicted in the image. By renaming the file to indicate what’s in the photo, and to add a keyword from the page, it give the image more context than the default, generic file name.

2) Always include ALT text, which is used by screen readers. ALT text is read by screen readers (special web browsers made for the blind and visually impaired — these read the page aloud). When you skip adding ALT text to images, it creates a bad user experience for the visually impaired.

I can hear you saying now, “Blind people don’t use our website!” Consider this then — Googlebot is also a screen reader.

That’s right. The crawler that indexes your web pages cannot “see” — it only reads the page, including the ALT text used to describe images.

Google has stated several times in it’s Quality Guidelines that a high-quality website is accessible, meaning it has descriptive text for images that are in the page. Have someone look at the source code, and make sure your website is outputting ALT text for all visible images.

3) Use appropriately sized images for fast loading time.

If you are uploading photos directly from your smartphone to your website, you are probably adding several seconds of load time to your web page. Modern smartphones take photos at a very high resolution. Most monitors top out at 2600-2700 pixels wide.

If you hire a professional photographer, your images may be even larger — 4000 wide or even multiples more.

Consider whether you really need images that large on your website. You can resize the original photos into smaller versions in Photoshop or other professional graphics programs.

Saving download time on your web pages is good for both user experience and SEO. No one wants to wait twenty seconds for all the images on your page to load. Resize images to find a balance between image quality, page download speed, and the specific uses for images on your website.

#LockedownSEO #seo #imageSEO

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Willbe “Introduced Beats”, “Separate Ways Remix”
(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Audiobinger “Next Level”
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