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3 Ways to Optimize Photos on Your Website to Boost Your SEO

After reading my blog post on the importance of a blog for your SEO efforts, you probably realize how helpful content can be toward Search Enginge Ranking for your website. But, what you may not realize is that images can also be used to generate traffic.

If you are a product-based company, image based traffic is key for you, however the following tips will be helpful to any business who wants more traffic.

1. Naming Your Photos Descriptively

When it comes to SEO, it is important to use strong keywords to help your website rank with search engines. In addition to crawling the text on your website, search engines also search for keywords within your photo file names.

I'll use this image of a sneaker as an example:

Converse chuck taylor all stars

You could upload the photo to your website using the name that your camera gave such as IMG1897.jpg. However, it would be more beneficial to you to name the file: converse-chuck-taylor-all-stars.jpg

When you're naming your photos try to use keywords your clients would use if they were searching for your products. The Google Keyword planner can be helpful with this.

2. Using Keywords in Your Alt Text

When you see a photo of a man on the phone, you instantly recognize what’s taking place in the photo. However, this recognition is not possible for search engines. You have to tell them what is taking place in the photo, and you do that with alt text.

When you are posting an image to your website here is how to code it to include an alt tag:

<img src="converse-chuck-taylor-all-stars.jpg" alt="Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars"/>

It's that easy. Just make sure not to keyword-stuff your alt tags. Describe the image in simple and descriptive terms.

3. File Size

Page load time is huge when it comes to SEO. So the faster you can get your pages to load the better. To avoid extra load time from your images, make the file size as small as possible (without sacrificing quality, of course).

Don't do this by placing the image on your webpage and shrinking the dimensions in the source code. This will not help to decrease your load time since the browser has to download the full size image first before resizing it. Instead, use a photo editing software to make it smaller.

These three steps to optimizing the photos on your website are pretty simple, but may take some time to execute depending on how many images you have on your website. Just think of it this way, practice makes perfect!

Post author
Kimberly Portuondo
January 12, 2015
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