Complete SEO guide for images

Having excellent SEO for your images means that not only Google images will index them but it also helps in adding to the overall SEO and value to the page/post that the image is displayed in.

Having correct SEO for your images is actually quite simple, you just need to follow some simple guidelines.

Image

The image itself should be at a high-resolution for the modern web, have compression and alternate sizes available. WordPress is good for this and saves you splitting up the image manually. Serving your images through a CDN for quick loading times can help you avoid page leaves and make your image be seen quicker.

Filename

Just like a webpage URL having the right file name for your image is crucial, compare IMG_0159.jpg to Lake-Daylesford-2018-drone.jpg

Obvious to see that any webcrawler can tell what the image is about, that’s without looking at the code linked with image. You want to avoid massively long filenames, it’s just best to have what the image is off and a short description.

australian-magpie-bird-eating-worm-winter.jpg

coffee-at-cafe-delishi-southbank-2019.jpg

Putting the year in the image file name i find helps but WordPress includes the year and date month with its media directory, i.e the year and date month is in the full image URL anyway…

write.corbpie.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Lake-Daylesford-2018-drone.jpg

dashes or underscores are a nice touch instead of spaces, in reality it doesn’t matter but the aesthetics is pleasing.

The image (<img) tag

<img is the html tag used to include/show images on a webpage. You can read about the image tag specifically here. The main aspects for SEO is the title title="" and alt alt="" attributes.

alt

Alt is shown when the image is missing or didn’t load, basically it is what the image is as text. Making it similar to filename you should put more information into the alt, note that for accessibility reasons have a very descriptive alt is good for webpage readers that the blind use (screen readers).

title

Title is what gets displayed when you hover your mouse over the image, quite similar to alt in that most cases you wont see it. It’s still very important as web scrapers read the source code of your website and the image title is visible there.

<img src="https://write.corbpie.com/2019/01/coffee-at-cafe-delishi-southbank-2019.jpg" alt="Coffee from Delishi cafe Southbank taken early 2019" title="Delishi cafe southbank coffee early 2019">

The following image tag provides solid SEO for the terms:

  • Delishi cafe
  • Delishi cafe Southbank
  • Delishi cafe 2019
  • Delishi cafe Southbank 2019
  • Delishi cafe coffee
  • Delishi cafe Southbank coffee
  • Delishi cafe coffee 2019
  • Delishi cafe Southbank coffee 2019
  • Coffee Southbank

and many more at a lesser extent.

Note Delishi Cafe Southbank is fictional.

The page (URL)

Having your image on a page that includes grammatically sound related content with a URL again that relates or resonated to the image/s is the finishing touch.

You can bury an image onto a page with little significance but if someone comes across your image on Google Images they will be clicking through to the page it’s linked on with hope to see more details or images.

SEO can be seen as many cogs working together, Providing good SEO compliant content with good SEO structured images on a URL that backs this up is a path to success.