IMAGE SEO: ALT Tags, Title Tags & Image SEO Tips for your website.

Images are crucial to a successful online presence, but just having images on your website won’t be enough to create any sort of dent in your website traffic, leads, and sales.

But, what if I told you that by optimizing your images for search engines you can increase your rankings, web traffic, and even your leads and sales?

It’s true and all it takes is a healthy dose of image SEO.

What Is Image SEO?

Image SEO is that the process of helping search crawlers understand images.

Because they can’t actually see the image, search crawlers consider additional information to see what the image shows and how it relates to the content of a web page. While machine learning has come quite ways, cracking the code of making crawlers “see” and understand images on their own continues to be far away in the future.

How Search Crawlers “See” Images: Alt Tags, Title Tags, and File Names

Search crawlers consider some key bits of data embedded within the image in order to “see” it: the file name, the image alt-tag, the title tag, and in some cases, the anchor text and also the caption.

What is the Image File Name?

The image file name is the name you save it as on your computer before uploading it to your website. Once uploaded, it becomes a part of the image’s URL:

Google, Bing, and other search engines use the image’s file name for clues about the image’s subject material.

PRO TIP: Make your file name have a good description. as an example, “Image-SEO-Tips.jpg” is more useful and better for SEO purposes than “IMG890654.jpg”

What is Image Alt-Tags?

The image alt-tag is kind of possibly the more important attribute to add to your photos. However, alt-tags weren’t specifically created for SEO—I can’t put it any better than Wikipedia:

{ “Alternative text is text associated with an image that serves the same purpose and conveys the same essential information as the image. In situations where the image is not available to the reader, perhaps because they have turned off images in their web browser or are using a screen reader due to a visual impairment, the alternative text ensures that no information or functionality is lost.[1] Absent or unhelpful alternative text can be a source of frustration for visually impaired users of the Web.” }

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Accessibility/Alternative_text_for_images

It’s a good idea to use keyword-rich alt-tags but avoid keyword stuffing. Here’s the alt-tag example Google gives:

Not so good:

<img src=”Image SEO.jpg” alt=””/>

Better:

<img src=”Image SEO.jpg” alt=”Image SEO Tips”/>

Best:

<img src=”Image SEO.jpg” alt=”Image SEO for website”>

To be avoided:


<img src=”Image SEO.jpg” alt=”Image seo digital marketing seo tips website image seo Optimize on-page seo for your website ”/>

What is the image Alt-Tag?

The title tag is that the title of the image. If you hover over it, it’s the text that may appear. If you would like to provide detail without providing captions, this can be where you are doing it.

What's the difference between an Image Alt-Tag & Image Title Tag?

An alt-tag is what is going to show up if your image does not—for example, if it takes too long to render, or if HTML or graphics are disabled, like in an email. An alt-tag is additionally the main point of reference for search crawlers to help them determine what your page is about.

The title tag is what shows up when someone hovers over the photos and doesn’t show at all if the photo doesn’t render.

How to Optimize Your Images for SEO

If you're using WordPress or a similar platform, you should be ready to add image data right after you upload your photo. It should look like this:

There also are many SEO image optimizers and plugins you'll install on the backend of your website. You don’t just need to optimize the metadata of an image, you would like to make sure it’s technically optimized. That includes:

Choosing the correct file format: you have got three options for images, .PNG, .JPG, and .GIF. PNGs produce higher-quality photos, but have a larger file size. JPGs are lower-quality but are generally smaller in size. GIFs are used for animated images and looping videos.

Compressing your images: It’s generally a decent idea to keep your images no larger than 100KB to keep loading time as fast as possible. But if the image continues to be distorted and also the quality isn’t good, keep increasing little by little so you've got an image at the smallest size possible at the best quality possible.

Final Word on Image Optimization

Images help convert customers, the human brain can process images up to 60,000 times faster than words, and people are impatient. However, in order for your images - all of your images, from website banners to background images - to be found, you need to possess them optimized. If you would like to help with Google image SEO, give us a call.