“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
You must have heard this phrase a thousand times before. I can bet!
When you are building your website, you add images to make it look good, make it appealing and memorable for your visitors, and support what you are trying to convey, more beautifully.
What if we tell you that images not only help your site visitors to understand your content and pages more easily, and they can even help search engines! Though only if done the right way.
Interesting. Isn’t it?
I heard you say yes!
Well, let’s see what little tweaks you can make while uploading an image to your website to make it more friendly, not only for real people but also for search engines. And, well, rank higher in search with better image SEO.
Rename your image on your computer
First step of image SEO is to properly rename your image before you upload it on your website.
Why?
When you upload an image, by default, the name of the image will be used in the image URL.
For example, while writing this blog, I created an image to use on this blog and downloaded that on my computer.
By default, image name looked like this:
As you can see, the name of the image in the above snapshot is “DSxbj.” Does it make any sense? Absolutely not.
So, before uploading, I renamed it first.
Now, the name of the image is “Image SEO – By Digital Squad.” Makes sense.
Use proper image tags
Once you upload your image to the website, popular website builders like WordPress and Webflow allow you to set image tags that search engines use to understand and comprehend an image.
For this article, we will be using the Digital Squad website, which is built on WordPress.
After uploading the image “Image SEO – By Digital Squad” on the website, WordPress allows me to easily set:
- Alternative Text: Also called “Alt Text,” it’s used by search engines to understand what the image is about. When an image fails to upload due to any issue, say slow internet, browsers display Alt Text in place of the image.
- Title: You get it!
- Caption: Caption text is displayed below the image, on any page where you choose to embed it.
- Description: Using this field, you can describe your image in a bit more detail.
In Webflow as well, you get the option to set Alt Text of each image you upload:
Hope by now you have got an idea of the best practices to upload images on your website and optimize those for SEO. These little tweaks with images will not only help your visitors with a good user experience, but also support search engines to understand your website content better and get more hits in search!
And if you need any help with your digital marketing and SEO, feel absolutely free to contact Digital Squad anytime. Our team of marketing specialists is always happy to help.
Besides being one of the 7.9 billion people, I am a Digital Marketer and spend most of my time playing with words, numbers, and web — Helping creators and brands level up their online presence.
