SEO Best Practice For Adding Images To a Website

Images on websites are often overlooked when it comes to adding content to websites. Following best practices when adding images will help to optimise your site. Content on your website is 80% more likely to be read if it has an image. That is reason enough for me.

Adding images can slow down your website. With effect from July 2018, Google can give your site a negative rank factor if it loads too slow. We all like a site that loads quickly. If it is too slow to load there is a good chance your potential customer will give up and go elsewhere. The Google Speed Test will give you your current load speed.

Now let's look at the positive side of having images. We are all familiar with the term SEO (search engine optimisation). We think about SEO with regard to the content that we add to our sites. But, are you optimising the images you add too? Most people assume your web developer will do this for you and some will but not all. Also, many of us now build or manage our own websites. We use 'off-the-shelf' templates from providers such as WordPress and Wix.

Optimising your images for SEO is as important as the content. These best practice tips should help you to improve the SEO of your site with a few simple steps.

1. Compress your images. This can be done before using Adobe Photoshop's 'save for web' function. Or one of the many image compression apps available online such as TinyPNG, TinyJPG  or JPEGmini. There are also plugins available for some 'off-the-shelf' providers. Smushit is a plugin that works with WordPress to compress and optimise your images.
2. Change the Filename. Before adding your images to your website change the filename. In a WordPress site this is called the Title and you do have the opportunity to change in the Image fields. Make the filename relevant to what the image is about or the content on the page. Include one of your target keywords if possible.
3. Complete the Alt Text or Alt Tag. Once you have uploaded the image to your site there is the opportunity to add some more fields. These will help with your SEO. Alt Text or Alt Tag should also contain a description of your image including a keyword for the page. The search engine crawlers will see this text. It helps tell search engines what your page is about so very important to complete.
4. The Caption – the caption is displayed on the page or shown when you hover over it depending on your settings. Most do not use this but if you are adding a caption it would be prudent to add in the keyword for the page.
5. Description. This is unlikely to affect your SEO too much but as every little helps you should fill it in. All you are doing here is helping the search engines find your page. If the search engines can find it, there is more chance of it showing up in searches.

Search engines can not read images. If you give your images filenames, alt text/tags, and descriptions they can understand the image.

At SPC Marine Marketing we are able to offer SEO and content marketing services. If you need any advice please get in touch. We will happily chat for FREE. Either phone myself (Heidi) on +44 (0) 7804906261 or send a message on heidi@spcmarinemarketing.com