SEO Basics – Optimizing Images
“Every Picture Tells a Story” – Rod Stewart, Ronald David Wood
Here is an unoptimized image.
Here is an optimized image.
Think Carefully about Optimizing Your Images
Can you tell the difference?
Image Title. Hover over the top image and you’ll see “pic20471″. That’s an image file name you might see on a stock photo website or for personal images in your own hard drive. A lot of folks will upload images into their blog with those titles and leave it at that. Hover over the second image and you’ll see “image optimization merits thought”. I optimized this image for the phrase “image optimization”. Upper / lower case composition is OK, but I use all lower case mainly out of habit. Avoid all caps – it’s off putting to human readers when the title displays in search results. Title tags should be relevant, though, again for search and human readers. That’s why I tacked on “merits thought”.
Caption. You’ll notice the second image has a caption. I love captions. They give you another opportunity to insert keywords, and they allow you to tell a story with your image. Stories engage readers. A captioned image makes readers curious to read your post. For b2b sites, captions are especially important for identifying products and services. It helps readers associate the image of your product with its name and one or two important benefits.
ALT Tag. The alternate description of an image, or ALT tag, displays when the image is not available to be viewed. ALT tags have been devalued by Google and other search engines, so are not a high value SEO element. However, they are very important as a courtesy to readers! The ALT tag for the second image is “Standing woman, rubbing chin, looking perplexed.” A good ALT tag describes the image and follows standard punctuation and grammar rules, so that someone who can’t see the image can easily get a mental picture of it. It doesn’t hurt to include keywords. You can see the ALT tag text by “viewing source” of this page in your browser, or by right-clicking on it and “inspecting element”.
Image Links. Note the second image links to a relevant page of my website. If an image is a snapshot story, give readers an opportunity to read the full version, or take them to a page on your site that allows them to inquire or order. Images can be gateways to conversions. And – a robust internal linking structure strengthens the SEO performance of your site.
Why Image Optimization Is Important for B2B and B2C SEO
Image search is getting more popular by the day. Check your stats – have you noticed an increase in referrals from image searches? People want to see what products look like. If you have a striking image and it displays on the first page of image search returns, you’re going to get qualified prospects clicking through to your web pages. Any product or service that has a visual element in the making a sale should have well optimized images – and that includes an awful lot of stuff, from apples to zithers.
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Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting, and content marketing.
Wow! I usually stay away from these sort of articles because I never really know what they mean. But this is wonderfully explained.
My blog is fiction-based, so I don’t know if SEO is something I should think about (told you I don’t know what these things mean!), but am trying to learn new things for the future.
I was led here by @EmApocalyptic . So glad I did!
Hi Marisa, Thanks for coming by! Yes, SEO articles can get very technical, but for the most part I try to keep things simple. As far as your own blog, if you want people to find you online when they’re searching on Google, then yes, you’ll want to pay attention to SEO. Not everybody does, though. Writers have many other ways of reaching potential readers, so it just depends on who you’re trying to reach and why you want to connect with them.
That alt image tag is important for so many people. Both low bandwidth users as well as audio readers benefit from the descriptions in addition to the SEO consequences. Always good to make sure the page is as friendly to readers as possible.
Fred, thank you for amplifying this point about user experience. It’s taken me a long time to really grasp the importance of ALT tags, and I’m making a real effort now to write them properly. This does take some work: trying to describe certain images in a compact number of words can take a lot of thought and time.
Brad,
As a youngish man, at first glance, I felt that either both of the pictures looked, well .. rather nice.
But on a closer look, the second picture does look much more professional with all of the features you describe. The standard of the first picture might be Ok if you are sharing it on a casual blog with a few mates, but it is not OK for a medium sized B2B enterprise, and unless proper captions, links etc. are included, the image created amongst prospective customers (or at least those who are reasonably tech savvy) might be one of slight carelessness or cheapness. This is not to mention the point which you made about captions and keywords etc. providing more opportunities for the appropriate use of keywords.
And none of this is hard, either. I don’t know what it’s like in conventional website design, but in blogging, WordPress makes it so easy. Even I can do it (though I have gotten into the bad habit of not using alternate text) and I don’t have a clue about html or the technical aspects of web site design or anything like that. So no one has any excuse about it being too hard to implement.
Also, from a point of copywrite perspective, some of the features which you mention above become a simple matter of common etiquette and legal necessity in cases where the enterprise in question does not own the rights to the picture. Sure, there are ways other than captions, headings or links to provide correct attributation (this could be done within the text of the discussion), but use of these features does make this process much easier and creates a much better impression on web site visitors.
Andrew, You raise a number of good points about image management – maybe enough here for me to do a whole new post. Images tend to get short shrift from bloggers, I think because they are somewhat of a chore and can be time consuming to handle properly. But, images are arguably more important to readers than text! You’ve given us a lot to think about here – thank you. And … I will see if I can get this lady’s phone number for you.
Thanks Brad – that would be great. We’d better just check whether or not she is married, though.
This probably doesn’t apply so much for the static parts of a company’s web site, but in the case of corporate blogs (as is the case for personal blogs), the process of securing appropriate permission to use the pictures can be extremely frustrating, especially where the blog involves use of lots of images sourced from external providers. Even when sourcing images from well-known sites like Flickr, the process of contacting the copyright owner concerned and receiving a response from them often takes several days or even more than a week. This, I imagine, would make life particularly difficult for corporate bloggers, particularly when the pressure is on to pump out a high volume of work within challenging timeframes. And when you add to this any potential budgetary constraints associated with charges levied by copyright holders for commercial use of their work, the whole process must be a nightmare.
Personally, I have given up on using pictures from anywhere except Wikipedia. Whenever I post an entry these days, I just do a quick check on Wikipedia to see if there are any decent pictures and quickly check the statement permission regarding re-use of any ones that I like on the site. If there are no suitable pictures on Wikipedia, I just don’t bother looking anywhere else. The whole process of contacting the copyright holder and waiting for a response is just too time consuming and too hard.