It’s Tuesday Tip time again already! I thought this week I’d go back to looking at some of the key factors that need to be considered to ensure your website has a good chance of ranking well on search engines. So let’s look into optimising your images.
Images help to bring your website pages to life and create an enticing environment, encouraging people to stay and read more! They also help visitors to quickly understand what your page content is about. The same is true of search engines – by using the ‘alt’ tag (or ‘alt’ attribute) of your images can help contribute towards search engine rankings. The alt tag also helps with accessibility. For example, people who are visually impaired and using a screen reader, which reads out the tag. This lets them know what the image is about.
Make your alt tag useful – use your focus keyword/keyphrase for the page that the image is on. However, if you have multiple images on that page, don’t use your keyword/phrase for all the images as this could be deemed as ‘spam’ by search engines. Try and keep them unique and interesting.
I’ve talked before about site speed (see Tuesday Tip #4), and images can have a big impact on your website loading times. If your website features lots of smaller sized images (ie on a blog for example), but they have been uploaded at their original high quality, you will find that this slows things down… and nobody likes waiting! Keep your bounce rate to a minimum and serve your website pages quicker by adjusting the quality of uploaded images.
Renaming image file names can also help with SEO. Instead of it being called ‘102345-AB.jpg’ (which means nothing to anyone!), rename your image with a useful description, ie ‘morning-sunrise.jpg’, for example.
Total Web Creations can work with you and your images for your website – helping you to make them useful! Ask me today for more image tips.
