Making Your Images SEO Friendly

We’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks ‘tidying’ a few of our clients websites, and a large portion of our time has been spent by making sure that the images used are SEO friendly.  Most people when they use photos on a website are clearly just thinking about the overall impact the picture has on the design of the website and if it will help with conversion. 

Now that is great, we always say build for humans first and search engines second. However, its not too difficult a  job to make the images SEO friendly too, and if you get into the habit of completing these tasks as you go it makes for much easier ongoing management.

So here are the steps you can take to aid your SEO efforts.

1. Name your photo. Quite frequently we get photos sent to us with naming conventions such as img-1234.jpg – You need to change this to words that make sense for the image. If your image is of a sitting dog, then call the image sitting-dog.jpg
2. When you upload your photo there are then three areas that you need to write some text into
   1. The Alt-Tag – this is important as it is the tag that is used for usability purposes. The Alt Tag should describe your image, but if you can get your keywords in the Alt Tag
   2. The Title Tag – These are handy for users as they tend to appear when you roll over the image with a mouse, good for product shots, but should always be filled in
   3. The Caption – Again useful for product shots, similar to the Title tag, but they appear always on site, normally directly under the image. So if you always want the description of the image visible this is the one to definitely use. If you don’t want the description visible leave this one blank and use the Title tag instead.
3. Finally proximity, try wherever possible to get your images close to where you are talking about the keywords the image represents. This makes the whole SEO strategy for that page cohesive.

It is worth spending a bit of time going through your website and completing these steps (OK you might not want to upload new images with the correct naming convention) but as a minimum do  write you Alt Tags, Google will thank you!