How important is it to have SEO friendly images? Does your article or blog post even need an image at all?
Images help bring your articles to life and break up the monotony of any long-form content. Also, Google Image Search is becoming more popular. 10% of all Google traffic is done through Images.google.com.
That’s approximately 1 billion page views per day!
Google Image searches are 10 times more frequent than any search on Bing and Yahoo. Including SEO friendly images in your content is a great strategy for increasing your organic traffic.
Like any good SEO strategy, creating SEO friendly images can be achieved by following a few simple steps. Let’s take a look at how to create SEO friendly images in 7 easy steps.
How to Create SEO Friendly Images
Step #1 – Choose Relevant Images
The first step for including images in your SEO strategy is to make sure you are choosing relevant images. Why is this important? A big part of any SEO strategy includes UX or user experience.
Choosing an image that has nothing to do with your content will confuse your reader. People don’t like feeling confused, so they will leave the page without finishing the article. This will lower your ‘On page’ time, which hurts your ranking, etc. You get the idea…
So how do find (or create) images that are relevant to your content? Start with great images, try to avoid free stock images as much as possible.
If you don’t have images of your own you can use, there are other options for finding unique images. You can look for Creative Commons images from Flickr.com or Unsplash.com, but make sure you attribute the image to the original photographer.
You can spice up any images you find with online image editors like PicMonkey and Snappa. You can also create your own SEO friendly images using these tools. Snappa is great for creating infographics.
Step #2 – Keyword Planning
Now we get into the technical side of our SEO strategy and the foundation of any good strategy is planning. Before you set out to make your images SEO friendly, you need to know what keywords you want to target.
When choosing keywords to target you should dig deep and go for long-tail, descriptive phrases.
Is the image of a product? If so, what model is it? What color is it?
Be as thorough as possible with your keyword planning. Starting with tools like SEMRush or Google’s Keyword Planner will give you the insight you need in choosing the right long-tail keywords.
Step #3 – Naming Images for SEO
As far as search engines are concerned, having SEO friendly images starts with the names of the files. So how should you name the image file to make it SEO friendly? Use your long-tail focus keyword in your image name, this tells Google what your image is about without needing to ‘look at’ the image.
Are you wondering how to do this? It’s easy: if your post is about Malibu Beach and your image shows a sunset over a beach in Malibu. The file name should be malibu-beach-california-sunset.jpg, not the default name SMB2456367.jpg.
The phrase used for naming the image would be based on the long-tail phrase chosen during your keyword research. To break it down and make it simpler, let’s look at the image name we used in our example: malibu-beach-california-sunset.jpg. The main subject of the photo is Malibu Beach, in California, which is why the phrase is at the beginning of the file name.
Step #4 – Be Mindful of Image Size
Another important SEO ranking factor is page load speed. Because of this, compressing large image file sizes has become crucial to gaining a competitive edge in search results. The goal here is to compress the images as much as possible without losing any quality.
As a general rule of thumb, any image with a file size over 250kb should be compressed and optimized for the web. There are tons of free tools and WordPress plugins available to handle the compression for you. Online photo editors like PicMonkey and Snappa allow you to compress images before exporting.
Step #5 – Image Alt Text for SEO Friendly Images
The alt text or ‘alt’ attribute on the image element is what will be the descriptive text displayed when the image can’t be displayed.
So, when would images not be displayed? There are a few situations where this might be the case. The reader may have turned off images in their web browser or they could be using a screen reader due to visual impairment. In these cases, adding alt text to the images ensures the reader also gets the same information as viewers who see the images.
The other reason using alt text is important for SEO friendly images is that search engines use this text, combined with the image file name, to determine the content of the image. Make sure to add alt text to every image you use!
Also, make sure the alt text you use includes the keyword phrase for the page it is included on. It is very important to describe what’s in the image for both search engines and people. Be careful to not over optimize or keyword stuff, but the more relevant this information is to the topic the better.
Step #6 – Add Captions
What are images captions and why are they important? An image caption is the small text that accompanies the image on the page, usually underneath the image. The caption is not connected with the image tag but is still important for having SEO friendly images.
This is because people tend to use captions when scanning an article. Think about it, when you scan an article you usually read the headings, look at the images, and read the image captions if there are any.
When it comes to captions, avoid over-optimization. Always think of your reader first and determine if a caption is needed for the particular image SEO.
Step #7 – Adding Structured Data
The final step to having SEO friendly images is to include structured data on the page. Google has said that structured data does not help you rank better. Yet, adding it to your pages will help your images display as rich results by search engines. This means an Image Search result that is populated with more relevant information, which is important to any SEO image strategy. Google Images currently supports structured data for the following types:
• Product
• Video
• Recipe
Follow Google’s Structured Data General Guidelines to get a better understanding of how best to create this data. The biggest thing to remember is that the image attribute is mandatory and that your image needs to be crawlable and indexable. In conclusion, making sure you always have SEO friendly images in your articles is an important part of your SEO strategy.
By having your article images rank well in Google Images you can drive a lot of extra traffic to your article. By applying the seven SEO tips listed above to all your images, you will have a great foundation for implementing a winning SEO strategy.
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