Optimising the images on your website helps the tiny robots crawling your site to understand what an image is about, as obviously they are unable to ‘see’ it. Properly labelling your images can help to improve your rankings as the pictures can be indexed and added to Google Images, which can bring more traffic to your site.

One of our most successful SEO clients gets a lot of traffic through Google Images because they have successfully labelled each image on their site and these regularly appear in searches. Optimising images is especially effective for websites selling visual products or services, for example furniture stores (our client mentioned above), clothes stores or photography or art websites.

Using proper alternative text tags on your images will also make your site user friendly. If your image doesn’t appear for whatever reason (for example if a user is using an unsupported browser), the alternative text for the image will also show visitors to your site what the picture is about. In short, optimising your images is best practice for improving your rankings and making your site more user friendly.

It’s relatively easy to optimise your images for SEO purposes and therefore there’s no excuse not to do it! Here are some top tips for getting those photos in order…

1. Save your images in the correct format. Most browsers support JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP image formats.
2. Never save images as numbers e.g ‘Image_001.jpg’.
3. On your product pages, save your pictures as the product name or description – e.g ‘Beaded-Green-Maxi-Dress.jpg’. Think about what a user would type into Google to find your product and use that phrase.
4. If your website is service based, save your pictures as your keywords. For example, if you’ve got a picture of your equipment on your homepage, don’t save the file as ‘Our-CNC-milling-machine.jpg’ – call it ‘CNC-milling-Birmingham’.
5. Use ‘alt’ tags (alternative text tags) where possible. If you have a CMS for your website, you may be able to do this yourself. Simply use the same keyword/description as the filename for your alternative text.
6. If you’re unsure where to begin with re-naming your images, start with your homepage. Choose the first picture at the top of your site – which will normally be your logo and rename this as your top keyword as this is the first image the Google robots will find.

Many people forget about images when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Don’t be one of them – get the edge over your competition and start optimising your pictures! You could find that it really helps your rankings and brings more traffic to your site.