5 Ways to Optimise Images for SEO on Your Blog

We all know how important optimising images for SEO is. Spending a few minutes optimising your images can help to boost your site’s speed, which is vital in our instant-access world. There are plenty of ways to do that, each of which is outlined in this guide for you to follow.

Going forward, it’s a great idea to keep this list bookmarked so you can work through and optimise images for SEO every time you publish something new to your blog or website.

Why should I optimise images for SEO?

Do you actually need to spend time optimising images for SEO? The simple answer is yes, and this is why…

Speed

There are a few answers to this, so let’s look at the first, well, first: speed. In our digital world, a minor inconvenience, like a website loading its content too slow, can be huge. We want things to happen instantly. How many times have you opened up a website only to leave after the page didn’t load right away?

I’m guessing plenty.

Additionally, site speed is now a factor Google’s (and other search engines) algorithms take into account when determining where a website is going to rank.

Improved search performance

When you give your images appropriate titles, alternative text, and file names, you provide additional context to search engines.

This context will allow search engines to better understand what the image is saying, and on a larger scale, what a website’s content is all about. By using this data, sites like Google and Bing will be better able to show you what it is you’re searching for.

Better browsing experience

We mentioned alternate text above – that’s not only good for search engines! It’s also vital for people with impaired vision when they visit your website.

Someone with a visual impairment may use a text-to-speech tool that reads back the content of the webpage to them. The problem with these is that when such a tool encounters an image, it doesn’t know what to do.

This is where alternative (or alt) text comes in!

Alt text provides context not only to search engines, but also to these text-to-speech apps. When the tool encounters an image with alternative text, it’ll read it out to the user, informing them what is contained within the image.

So, now we know why optimising images for SEO is important, let’s look at 5 ways that you can do just that!

How to optimise images for the web

Use relevant keywords

It can be super tempting to upload images without altering the file name, especially if you’ve taken the photos yourself. The default file name that comes from the camera is probably fine, right? Wrong!

When it comes to search engine optimisation, assigning correct, keyword-rich file names to the images you use on your website is vitally important. Search engines don’t only check the alt text and content on your webpage, but they also check file names too.

So, when naming your files, make sure to accurately relate to both the content within, and the content on the webpage it’ll appear on. For example, if your webpage is about finance, and you have an image of a bar chart, naming the file something like “financial_data_in_bar_graph.jpg” is perfect.

Use correct alternative text

As we said earlier, including relevant alternative text is one of the most important factors when it comes to optimising your images for SEO. Ultimately, if you’re going to take one thing from these tips, it should be to make proper use of alt text.

You should be aiming to fill out the alternative text for almost every image that appears on your website. As a guideline, here are some rules to follow:

• Describe your image in plain language – remember, first and foremost you should be writing for humans, not for robots.

• If you’re writing the alt text for a product image, make sure to include the serial/product number.

• Don’t stuff your alt text with keywords. Simple descriptions are perfect.

• If your image is purely decorative, like a text-separator, it doesn’t need alt text.

Something that I do every now and then is run through my website, picking out pages at random to see if there’s alt text present. You’ll be surprised how much stuff gets missed!

Resize your images

Remember us talking about the importance of page speed? One of the biggest contributors to increasing page load time is images being larger than they need to be.

A good rule of thumb is to make your images no wider than the width of the container they’re going to appear in. For example, if a blog post template will never be wider than 800px, then the images don’t need to be either.

If you have access to Adobe Photoshop, another great tip is to export your images via the “Save for Web” option. When doing this, adjust the options so your image is the smallest size possible without negatively affecting the overall quality. If you don’t have Photoshop, this can also be done in the free editing tool Canva.

Limit the use of decorative images

Realistically, any image on your website that doesn’t directly support the content can be considered decorative. This can include background images, buttons, borders, fancy text separators, and more.

Whilst they may make everything look nice and add some aesthetic appeal, they all contribute to the page’s load time. A good rule of thumb is to dramatically reduce the image sizes of everything that isn’t essential.

But for things you really don’t want to remove, here are some tips:

• If you have a large, patterned background, cut it down into just one tile, then repeat the pattern for your background via CSS.

• Shrink down wallpaper files as much as you possibly can without ruining the quality.

• If possible, use CSS to replicate the style of images. CSS code is wayyyyy less impactful than an image!

Test your page load speeds

It can be hard to know which pages actually need optimising as a matter of urgency. This is where speed test tools come in! My personal favourite is Pingdom Website Speed Test. Running these tests will tell you exactly what needs fixing on any page on your website.

I highly recommend, once you’re happy that you’ve done what you can to optimise, that you run your website through this tool. There’s plenty of stuff you can miss, which is where tools like this can be a huge benefit!

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