Images and photos are often overlooked when optimizing a website. Although they don’t carry as much SEO weight as they used to, it doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Here are 5 tips to maximizing results through images and photos:
File Name
The file name is the name of the image or photo that is stored on your computer (i.e. BopDesignLogo.jpg) and is often overlooked when uploading photos to websites and social media platforms. The file name field can provide SEO assistance for your target keywords. Before uploading images or photos to your website or social media profile take an extra minute to include target keywords in your image. Don’t be spammy about the file names. Instead, focus on generating an image file name that describes the image.
Alt Tags
Alt tags are meant to be an alternative information source for people with screen readers, for users that have chosen to disable images in their browsers, and search engines. The keywords that are included in alt tags are less important for SEO than they used to be, but leaving them empty can negatively impact your website ranking. So take a minute to include an alt tag with every image on your website.
Image Title
Image titles are the descriptive pop-ups that are displayed when you hover over an image on a website. This is more for website design than for SEO, but it is important to do correctly if implemented. If you are using image titles on your website be sure to keep them short, relevant, and catchy.
Photo Sharing
Starting up a Flickr, Picasa, or other photo sharing account for business photos and images can provide SEO benefits to your website. Within these accounts you can often add geo-targeting to your albums and target keyword phrases both the captions and descriptive fields. This tactic requires little maintenance and is easy to implement.
Photos on Facebook
Uploading photos on Facebook is not only a good way to generate communications from followers, but they also open the opportunity to spread awareness. After you have uploaded photos to Facebook it is beneficial to go back and tag people, places, events, or businesses in the photos or images. Tagging your photos will help to get the Facebook page more exposure in other news feeds.
Photos and images will always be important to the design of your website and social media platforms, so take advantage of them by implementing the above optimization techniques.