How to SEO Images
Using SEO images is an important part of ensuring that your audience reads and understands your content. An image or a video can help with understanding and make the content even more compelling, useful, and valuable to your audience.
Include SEO Images in Your Content – An image will make all the difference for your audience because it will get their attention. When you pick an image for content that image will often show up when people share the content which helps get more eyes on it.
Choose Relevant Images – It’s imperative that the images you choose add to your content or story and not detract from it. Think about who your audience is when choosing the images, especially if they show people. Speaking of that, images with people get more attention than images without people.
Don’t Steal Images – This has nothing to do with SEO other than you don’t want to get your site taken down for stealing images. You cannot do a Google search for images and then use it as your own. You must create the image yourself or buy it from a reputable source and then follow the rules about how you can use the image.
File Name – When you get an image you need to rename it to match the content you’re putting it with. Use the keywords that you’ve developed for that piece of content in the image title. It’ll help the image show up in searches which will then lead back to your content.
Alt Tags – Alt tags or alt text is where you put the image description. The image description is important. Don’t just put “lady with the blue shirt” as the description. Instead, you can add your keywords. For example, if you’re creating content for the virtual assistant community about keeping files organized you can change the lady in a blue shirt to “virtual assistant organizes her files”.
Compress Images – You will need to make sure the image is the right size for the web and not for print. This means the image can be smaller than you would make it for printing and still look amazing. You may want to read more about compressing and image sizes at Washington University in St. Louis’s Arts & Sciences Computing web page. (https://computing.artsci.wustl.edu/help/web/resize-images-web)
Ensure Your Image is Responsive – You also want to make sure the images you use are responsive. If you are using a responsive website template like a responsive self-hosted WordPress theme read their instructions to ensure you’re doing it right.
Include Image Captions – A great way to improve the SEO for an image is to include a caption of some kind that will show up to the reader as well as the search engines. The caption can be the same or different from the description.
These tips will work for video as well as still images. The point you must think about is, what information can you add to any image to make it clearer who the information is for, what it’s about, and who should read it and why.