Did you know you can optimize your website’s images for better search engine rankings? It’s true, and if your images are optimized properly you can acquire tons of traffic to your site. Here’s how you can optimize your website’s images to make them search engine friendly:
Alt Tags
Because of the fact that search engines can’t read images, you’ll need to use alt tags to help characterize your image. Search engine spiders use alt tags to understand what an image is all about. For example, if I’m a dentist in St. Louis who specializes in teeth whitening and I have a picture of a patient getting their teeth whitened on one of the pages on my website, then I might make the alt tag something like, alt=”St. Louis Teeth Whitening”
File Name
Using keywords in your website’s URLs is important, and the same applies for your website’s images. You’ll want to make sure you use keyword-rich words in your image filename to help search engines dispose relevancy. Using the teeth whitening example from above, if your image is originally named “example_038472XLarge.jpg“, you might change the file name to something like “teeth-whitening-st-louis.jpeg“.
Google recommends putting your images in one folder on your site, such as yourdomain.com/images, rather than in a bunch of different folders on your site. You’ll also want to make sure you use common image file types such as JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP.
Title
The title of your images is another important factor when it comes to image optimization. Use descriptive title that assists in describing the image. Using a title such as “teeth whitening image” or “photo of a patient getting their teeth whitened” is too broad, and thus you’ll want to be more specific. You might want to change your image title something like “Patient Getting Teeth Whitened in St. Louis“.
Applying unique title tags, meta descriptions, and URL slugs to each individual page on your website is crucial when trying to outrank your competitors, and optimizing your site’s images is just as important.
I hope you find this information useful. Happy optimizing!
