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Typically, the focus of SEO is on optimizing the actual text of the page content and very little thought goes into image SEO.
Because Image SEO is often overlooked, it’s not nearly as competitive to rank for in the Google Image result pages (as well as Google+ and Universal Search). And if you’re looking for traffic to your website, this can be an easy win when done correctly and consistently. Not to mention that image SEO will tighten up the overall SEO-ness of your blog post (and website).
Whether it was my own site, helping with a friend's blog, or working for a client – in some cases, image SEO was responsible for up for up to 30% of all the organic traffic to a website!
So how do you optimize an image for search engines? Image SEO is pretty straightforward – another reason to do it if you have the time - because search engines cannot see images as we do, the effectiveness of your image SEO relies on how well you can describe an image. Simply, the better job you do in succinctly translating that picture into words, the likelier it will be picked up by Google Images.
Let’s get into the most important attributes for image SEO:
Image Filename
The actual image filename is the most important factor when optimizing your images. For example, if you have a photo of a green tea cup, you should name it…. green-tea-cup.jpg. No kidding! You, too, can do SEO.
Image ALT tags
The Image ALT text was designed for screen readers that would dictate the content to the visually-impaired. Though it wasn’t meant for SEO, ALT text is also a factor for image SEO. Like the image filename, it’s not brain surgery. Don’t overthink it. Use the ALT text attribute to further describe the image in better detail.
If you recently took a trip to India and snapped a photo of a camel in the desert city of Khuri, the ALT text shouldn’t be “my trip to india1.”
A better ALT text for this may be “Camel walking in desert sand in Khuri, India” (hover over the image to see the ALT text). Think of what a user may type in to find your image. Better yet, pretend you are actually describing the image to someone that is visually-impaired.
Surrounding Content/ Image Captions
This one is a little less straight-forward, but what it boils down to is selecting an image that is related to the content of your post/article. Search engines take cues from the text content of the blog post/article. So, make sure that the textual content of the page aligns with the image attributes we optimized for above.
The closer that content is to the image, the more likely search engines will see that image as relevant. For example, if you’re writing a blog post all about your all your interactions with monkeys during your trip in India, your image should be one of your interactions with monkeys while in India. Or if your post is about motivating employees, choose an image that aligns with that content. (Don’t use this post as the example of this last point)
More image SEO best practices:
Image SEO isn’t in my Top-5 tips for blog SEO, but it’s an often disregarded tactic that can bring value to your site.
