I rarely talk about SEO tactics and methods on Magnet4Blogging, largely because I’m not a huge fan of doing SEO.
Regardless, I do appreciate the importance of Search Engine Optimization, because, at the end of the day, search engine traffic is important for any online business or blog to grow and thrive, right?
So in this post, I want to talk about your website and blog post images. Moreover, I want to share with you some very simple ways in which to optimize your images for both performance and Google image search.
I’m sure you’ve used Google Image Search to find relevant images for something or another. You simply type in the keyword or phrase and you get rows and rows of images in the search results.
Did you know that if you have images that are well optimized for search engines that you can drive traffic to your blog from image search?
Yep, you can, so how do you optimize images for web performance? And how do your optimize them for search engines? Let’s find out.
Here’s what were going to be looking at
Now let’s take a look at each of these areas in greater detail.
How many times have you uploaded images to your website or blog with dumb names like DS980284.png?
One of the problems with uploading images that’ aren’t properly named is that when you want to use them again in the future, without reuploading them again, it’s going to be a time-consuming effort searching for them in your media file.
A little bit of care and effort, in the beginning, goes a long way so make sure you give your images proper names.
Also, it’s often a good idea to include your SEO keyword in the title of your images. And I don’t think you should use more than 3 words (including your keyword) when naming your images either.
OK, so here’s an example of correctly naming an image for your website:
optimize_blog_image.png
Sounds better than just something like IMG1456730.jpg, don’t you think?
How many times have you uploaded images that are HUGE in file size?
One too many times no doubt?
The problem with doing this is that you’re only adding to the page load-time of your blog post or website page.
Also, if you keep doing this, in time you’re going to end up with a very heavy website.
The thing is, it’s so easy to optimize image file sizes before uploading them to your site, and you can do it without sacrificing image quality as well. Here’s how;
Firstly, make sure the images are resized properly to fit into the area of the page it’s going in. If it’s a blog post then check the width of your post content area.
For instance, when I’m using images in my blog posts, I know the width of the content area is 750px, so it would be pointless for my images to be any wider than this.
You can resize images using most conventional desktop image editing tools. The one I use is called Photoscape for the Mac.
Once you have resized your images properly, head over to the TinyPNG website and drop your images directly into this page.
Your images will be compressed to a small file size without losing its quality, and you can then download them from TinyPNG to upload straight into your WordPress website or blog post.
How many images do you have on your website or blog with missing ALT attributes in them?
One too many again no doubt.
ALT tags are useful for describing your images to users and search engines. For instance, when you hover over an image, often you’ll see a description of that image or an instruction.
BUY NOW buttons are a classic example of this. When you hover over a BUY NOW button you may see a text saying, Click To Buy or something of similar description.
In WordPress, it’s so simple to add ALT tags to your images, see image below.
If you’re adding images to your web pages manually, here is a complete HTML image tag. Simply replace the ‘src’ with your own image URL, add your own ALT and title too.
As you can see, it doesn’t take much time or effort at all to optimize or create SEO friendly images for your website.
If you’ve never optimized a single image on your blog or website, I highly recommend you start doing so. I know this will probably take you some time, but you may benefit greatly from increased search engine traffic in doing so.
I hope you found this post useful, the very best of luck. Check out these other tutorials on our blog.
