Do you make this common website mistake? Do you fail to optimize images for SEO? From size considerations to alt-text, there are a few considerations and steps to take that can supercharge your website content’s SEO.
While optimizing images for SEO can seem time-consuming, they are small steps that you can take that will improve your chances of ranking in search results.
One of the most confusing SEO activities is alt-text (alternative text). In this post, we’ll explain how to optimize website images for SEO, including how to make them load fast and demystify alt-text. By the end of this post, you will know how to add alt-text properly to your website images.
What Is Alt-Text?
Let us start here, at the most confusing part of optimizing website images.
Using alt-text with images serves several vital functions on your website. Images not only make your website look nice but they break up large blocks of text, making them easier to read and provide a look and feel that is essential to communicating your brand.
For the visually impaired, alt-text on images can help describe the image and complicated concepts. It can help customers and prospects connect through the visuals you have added to your site.
Search engines like Google and Bing are placing increased importance on images. You can get your content discovered by doing an image search in Google. However, most people are not aware of how much the images contribute to your site’s search engine optimization (SEO).
Alt-text helps with image ranking and discovery and is one of the ranking factors for Google and other search engines.
In fact, images have a huge potential for impact – if you treat them right. Image optimization is one of the most impactful aspects of SEO, and yet, it is one of the most often overlooked.
How To Optimize Images For SEO: Two Simple Tips
When you’ve added your images, there are only a few easy steps to take to get the most out of them SEO-wise. Follow these tips and discover how your content begins to boost your discoverability.
1. Image Size and Speed Matter
Websites are becoming more visual. They seem to contain less text and more big, bold images and video.
Good web design practices dictate that your images should be high quality and high resolution so that they look good on any size screen and any type of device. The caveat is that hi-resolution images can slow down the time it takes for a web page to load once the viewer clicks on it.
Page load speed can be an SEO killer if it goes unchecked. How do you solve this problem?
Use images that are as big as you need them to be but not bigger than they need to be. Dimensions matter when you’re uploading images.
Consider using an image optimization plugin like Smush on your website. When you add an image, it automatically optimizes the image file size to speed up page loading. If you want to forgo a plugin, online tools such as TinyPNG are great for compressing images to smaller files.
2. Alt-Text, Always
You have uploaded your image – it’s loading fast for a better site visitor experience. Now you need to add the alt-text.
Alt-text is a short string of text (usually about 120 characters) describing the image. It is used by page readers to improve accessibility for visually impaired visitors and can also be displayed if the image does not properly load. Adding Alt text is important because while page readers cannot interpret an image’s content, they can read alt text. For viewers who cannot see the images, alt text gives viewers some context of what your website looks like and what the content is all about. Alt-text is also read by the bots that index your site for search engines. As such, alt text is a good place to include keywords relevant to the page’s subject matter.
Tip: Make it a habit to add alt-text to each new image uploaded. It can be tempting to leave alt-text for later, but you’ll be missing out on lots of SEO goodness in the meantime!
How to Do Alt-Text Correctly
To put it bluntly, most people don’t do alt-text well, if they do it at all. However, it’s not a particularly difficult task. You have about 120 characters to describe your image and include keywords relevant to the page content. The alt-text should be a combination of describing the image and keywords relevant to the page. For example, the above image of the camera on the table has the following alt-text:
A DLSR camera with a large lens is sitting on a wood table with a blurred potted plant on the right-hand side. This topic-relevant photo is being used to showcase how to optimize images for SEO.
Does every image need alt-text? Decorative images (e.g. brand graphics) do not need alt-text. If you are adding Pinterest pin images to let’s say your blog content, do not add the alt-text. Pinterest will use this instead of your preferred pin descriptions (that can be added to your HTML for the image or by using a plugin).
Tip: Try to include the focus keyword for which your page is being optimized. Any other keywords you can work in are a bonus. However, do not keyword stuff as search engines can pick up on this.
Website Image Optimization Mistakes to Avoid
As you want to keep your alt-text succinct, you may need to do some wordsmithing to fit everything you want to include. Describing the image can be tricky, but once you’ve done a few, it gets easier.
Think about your words as if you were not able to see the image. Does it make sense to you? Have you described the most important aspects of the image? Avoid using the words ‘picture of’ and ‘image of,’ which use up characters but do not add to the description. Also, avoid stuffing in too many keywords that make the text awkward to read or difficult to understand.
Optimize website images every single time before you hit publish: add alt-text and watch your content start to appear in image searches.
TIP: Read your alt-text back to yourself. If it makes sense and sounds natural, you’ve done it right!
BONUS TIP: Did you know that you can also add alt-text to social media posts? While these images are not often indexed by search engines, having alt text allows visually impaired followers to experience your images just like everyone else.
Get SEO Support: CM2 Media Is An SEO Agency
Did you know that CM2 Media is an SEO agency in Burlington, Ontario?
Image optimization is a relatively easy way to improve your website SEO. It’s a combination of ensuring that alt text is well-crafted and that the image file size won’t affect page load speed. SEO experts have tools that can flag images needing optimization in addition to many other SEO issues. Get in touch to chat about how we can help improve your SEO to get you noticed by search engines and more prospective customers.
Follow us on Instagram or LinkedIn. We look forward to hearing from you about using alt-text on your websites and how we can supercharge your SEO. We are located in Burlington, Ontario.