By naming your images for SEO, you can improve your site’s traffic and rank highly in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
You should include images on your site to boost social engagement, improve user experience, use your keywords, and drive traffic to your site through Google image search.
Now you know why including images in your site is beneficial for small business SEO, let’s move on to find out exactly how you can do it.
You should already be using your main keywords in your titles, tags, headlines, and URL. So, all you need to do is copy that over to your image names.
The keywords should be relevant to your images, and to increase your visibility in Google’s image search, relevance is key.
When you’re creating your page URL, you’ll need to insert your main keywords in there. You can change your URL so that it cuts out any stop words.
For example, if there’s a blog post for ‘How To Do Your Make-Up for Prom’, you might adjust the URL to ‘how-to-makeup-prom’. The stop words here are ‘do’, ‘your’, and ‘for’ and by cutting them out, it focuses more on the keywords that’ll help reach your target audience.
Now that you’ve got your targeted phrase, save your images using that phrase. If you have more than one for the same blog post, you can add additional numbers at the end.
Just make sure that whatever you name your image, it’s relevant to your content!
You’ve pretty much done all the preparation and got everything that you need in order, so now it’s time for you to upload it to your site.
Although you can paste your chosen keyword phrase into the Image Title, this won’t have an impact on SEO in any way.
Therefore, you must paste your phrase, i.e. ‘how-to-makeup-prom-1’ into the image’s Alt Text, as this makes all the difference.
After pasting your keyword phrase into Alt Text, you can also add additional phrases on the end to make it more relevant to that part of the blog, i.e. “How to Makeup Prom Tip 1”.
Here are 3 tips that you should follow to ensure that your content is well optimized for SEO.
If your image can’t be displayed for any reason, the alt text is a way of demonstrating exactly what the image is. It can also be a way of allowing people with visual impairments to understand what’s in the image.
To ensure that the content is more accessible to its users, it’s advised that you should always fill out the alt text. It might take a couple of extra minutes but it’s extremely easy to do and may also help to improve user experience.
Note: Only include keywords in your alt text if they’re relevant to the image.
The captions are commonly placed under the images on your site and will give a description of what the image is. They allow the user to gauge the full picture of your content.
Make sure that when you include image captions, they’re descriptive. If they’re not relevant, they’re not going to be useful to your user.
Again, you can add keywords into your descriptive captions but you want to ensure that it’s relevant and not overused.
Your page’s sitemap helps Google to crawl your pages and display them in the results.
By adding your images to your sitemap, you’re highlighting which images are the most important on your site and therefore should be in the results.