How To Optimise Your Images For SEO

Is it important to name your images for SEO? Do you have to have your photos saved as a certain file to get better SEO results for your website or blog? Images hold more power than most people think when it comes to SEO - when clever robots 'crawl' your website, they take into account more than just the words you use but also the images, usability, loading time, and other factors. If your images aren't optimised and it's difficult for the robots to crawl, or they're too big and are making your loading time slower, your website could be ranked lower in search engine results.

To make sure your images are fully optimised for your website or blog, follow these 3 tips:

1. Save Your Images In The Right Format

You want to ensure you are saving your images in the correct format so they work best for your blog or business website. Images can be saved as PNG, JPEG, GIF or PDF.

Although PNGs are become more and more popular as they can be saved as small files which are vibrant and sharp, they can become pixelated if repeatedly saved and used - unlike a JPEG file which can be saved as a small file and keep its quality over time. By keeping your images small but good quality you're ensuring your website loading time is kept to a minimum - Google likes that, and so do you users!

Slow loading times are the main reasons why users will leave your website creating a high bounce rate - most users won't wait longer that 3 seconds before giving up! Making sure your images are compressed (small in size yet great in quality) will help your audience stay with you for longer.

2. Name Your Images

Ok, confession time - I never used to do this when I first started blogging or working on websites, a whole 7 years ago now! I use to keep my image files as they were (another confession time, if I don't have my blog checklist I still sometimes forget - ggrrrrr!!!) but applying an image named 123.jpg doesn't help my title robot friends to recognise what the image is or how relevant it is to what I'm talking about.

When naming and saving your images, think about your keyword and what you're writing about to help robots index your image - what would your customers type into google to find your website or blog post? I have two helpful tools which help me: one is the search ideas bar at the bottom of my google search (here is an example of what comes up if I search for Social Media Marketing in Hampshire)

And Google Analytics which can give you a list of keywords people have searched for when landing on your website. Of course it's not that helpful when most of the weeks keywords are not provided - but it's a useful and fun exercise. (Someone found me with the keyword amazon? REALLY?)

When creating content and key-wording your website, these two tools are brilliant!

3. Tell A Story With Your Images

To help increase SEO with images, use relevant photos and images which tell your brand or article story visually. There's no point in placing a beautiful image of a sunset on the beach if you're talking about how Grumpy Cat rose to fame on social media, you know? Make your images relevant to your business and your articles.

You can also use imagery to break up your blog post - I do this all the time on my lifestyle blog. This helps longer posts to be easily digested by the reader - plus we retain more information if presented visually so you know you will be remembered.

If you would like help optimising your website or blog for SEO, get in touch - I would be delighted to help you!