How to optimise your images for SEO

Image SEO isn’t another big, complex tactic to learn. This just sits alongside your normal SEO strategy, but it legitimately can make all the difference.  

Having a properly optimised image can speed up your site, make your site be more accessible and bring in additional traffic. So it’s important that you actually consider this. 

How to optimise your images for search engines

Shrink image file sizes 

Having lots of large image file sizes can vastly slow down your page speed. Be sure to resize images to their maximum display dimensions. You can do this before and after uploading your images to your website.

Before: 

You can resize images in Photoshop, or there is a tool on Canva pro that can also do this. If you don’t have either of these you can get good results by using the compressor.io tool.

After: 

If you are using WordPress, you can use a plugin such as Resize Image After Upload or Smush to help you to do this. 

Having a high-quality image with a small file size is exactly what you want, so there’s no harm in doing both, before and after uploading. I try to always do both, it’s better to be over optimised in situations like this.

Appropriate name your images

Google publishes a guide of its own image best practices, and one of the simplest takeaways from this is that you should make sure that you are using descriptive image names.

As an example, using “Laptop-Flatlay-on-White-Desk.jpg is better than IMG00353.JPG.

I also like to use the image name as an opportunity to target the keyword an additional time. 

Don’t forget to add an alt tag

An alt tag provides a text alternative for an image. Alt tags help search engines and those using screen readers to have a better understanding of the web page. The original purpose and use of alt text were to help make images accessible to the blind and those with impaired sight.

Quite simply, they are a text description for each image that clearly describes what it shows. 

What to include in an Alt Tag: 

• Be Descript and Specific
  Alt text should always describe the contents of an image in as much detail as possible.
  
  The more specific you can be when describing an image, the better, as this will help it rank on Google Image Search and also help visually impaired people better understand the content on your blog.
  
• Be Relevant
  Alt tags aren’t a place to spam exact-match keywords and should be used to describe exactly what an image shows. Alt tags should absolutely be relevant.
  
  Try and write alt text that describes images in a way that relates to your blog post, especially when an image is more generic in nature.
  
• Be Unique
  Don’t use your page’s main target keyword as the alt tag for every image on the page.
  
  Always be sure to write unique alt text that describes the specific contents of the image.

An example of a good alt text would be “Grey laptop on a cluttered white desk”. The more specific you can be, the more effective your alt text will be. 

Geotag your image

This is probably the most underused image SEO tactic. You can literally connect your image to locations by Geo-tagging them. This is amazing if you are reviewing something that is local to where you are i.e. a restaurant or a product from a local boutique. Your blog posts will then rank in the images connected to that business.

I like to use Geo Imgr to do this, this is also where I’ll name my images and add the alt text. 

Yes, this isn’t a ranking factor but it has so much potential.

Implement Lazy Loading

We can’t ignore the fact that images are usually the assets on a page with the largest filesize and, therefore, they slow down your page. It’s unavoidable. 

But we cannot simply do without images, because they are too important to providing a great user experience. They make your content more engaging and pleasing to a user. 

So what we can do to speed things along it to use lazy loading to defer a browser from loading an image until it is needed.

I know I’ve only mentioned them but I use Smush for lazy loading images. I just really like this WordPress Plugin. 

So, there you are. 

This is my best advice on how to optimise your images for search engines. 

I hope you have found this helpful!

In this blog post, we speak about page/site speed a few times. If you are looking to learn about you can improve your site speed, I have a blog post dedicated to that here.