When thinking of on-page search engine optimization strategies, webmasters and marketing professionals often forget about using images as an SEO strategy. Not only does meta data and body text make a significant contribution to organic rankings, but images hold their value as well.
Now that the search engines tend to use multimedia in universal organic rankings, it gives SEO experts more of an incentive to use images throughout websites to their advantage.
There are a few vital methods of properly optimizing images; all of which I will explain here:
Naming the Image
How often do we upload or download images and name them exactly like this: image00123.jpg? The reality is, this holds no relevant value to the topic in which the image is referring to. Make it a point to name the file exactly what the image is.
For an example, take the image below. Instead of using a generated file name, I renamed this “golf-club.jpg.” If you use multiple words in the file name, it is important to use hyphens in between and not spaces. Much like URLs, this is how the search engines read the separate words.
Title, Description and Alternative Text of an Image
Each image should tell a story, and the title, description and alt text tell the story behind the image. It helps the reader and the search engines know exactly what the image is and what it is referring to in terms of the text on the same page.
If you right click on the image above and click save-as, you will notice that it will name the file exactly as I named it. If you hover over the top, it will show you the alternative text behind the image, thus describing the image.
In this particular case, the alternative text I used is “A driver hitting a golf ball off a tee.” Since this text is embedded in the HTML code, search engines see it, even if you, as a reader, are not paying attention to it. If your optimization goal for the page is to use the keyword “golfing” the alternative text in the image gives it extra juice and relevance to the topic of golfing.
Image Directories
Based on the size of your website, creating image directories, or topic silos for specific keywords is critical to on-page search engine optimization. For instance, let’s say my website is all about sports, then this particular image showing a golf club would be placed in an image directory called “golf” within my content management system (CMS).
Keeping the navigation of your website in this same order is a whole different story, but it is very important that images are separated based on their relevance to a particular topic. Just as the content and topics should be organized, the images should be organized on the back-end of the CMS as well. Search engines will scan the images and use them in their universal rankings or in the separate image search engines, such as Google Images.