A picture doesn’t just tell a thousand words: it can also determine whether your website ranks well in search engines. Unfortunately, many businesses neglect to optimize this crucial component of their website. Here are a couple of things you can do to make the most of each image.

Choose the Right Image

Yes, photos of funny kittens and fluffy corgis are cute. They may even be enough to pique a reader’s interest and prompt them to keep reading your article. But in the world of SEO, an image that has no relation to the body copy is a no-no. In the world of modern SEO, the reader is the king. If people click away from your page because of its misleading images, search engine’s will take this as a sign of of poor quality and penalize its search ranking.

Don’t Forget the Image Title and Alt Text

While search engines have never been more advanced, they still rely primarily on text to make sense of all the content on the World Wide Web—and that includes images. As such, it’s important that the images on your site are appropriately titled to represent the image.

If you’re uploading a photo of your new jewelry collection, the images should be title “Bronze Bracelet with Inlaid Opal” or the like instead of DSC_987—the search engine’s crawler can’t make heads or tails of the latter title. The same is true of your Alt Text.

Add Photo Captions

You’re not supposed to stuff your article or webpages with keywords, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take advantage of placing them in image captions where keyword placement is perfectly acceptable. What’s more, image captions are also another opportunity to add descriptive text that gives further context to your chosen photo.

Reduce the Image Size

Just how important is it to have a fast-loading website? As online retailer Amazon.com claims, a one-second slowdown of their website translates into $1.6 billion dollars in lost sales. Unfortunately, big photos are one of the most common culprits for website slowdowns. Luckily, you can easily optimize images by loading them into Photoshop and exporting it using the “Save for Web” setting.

Indeed, images are one of the most important SEO components that many people neglect to optimize. If you need more help with optimizing your website’s images, don’t hesitate to contact a trusted internet marketing company.

Sources:
10 Must Know Image Optimization Tips, shopify.com
How to optimize images for SEO, searchenginewatch.com