Chances are that you’ve already heard of the classic expression that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when it comes to SEO, can it be worth a thousand keywords? Not necessarily, but you don’t want to sell the impact of images short. It’s essential to make sure that you are using images both appropriately on the page and behind the scenes to reap the true benefits in terms of your SEO.
Images and Your Website
Before getting into the nuts and bolts of images and SEO, it’s important to bring up a few basic points that you should keep in mind when selecting images you want to use. One thing is making sure that you are very careful when it comes to the size of images that you choose. Right along with broken and outdated plugins, massive images are one of the biggest things that cause web pages to load slowly. Page loading speed is a true ranking factor, so be sure that you compress image files when possible, and avoid going overboard.
In addition, you want to make sure that the image formats and sizes you use are viable for social media, to make your content shareable. The nice thing about taking care of this issue now is that it will mean the images on your site are already perfectly matched for mobile devices. The key is finding how far you can reduce the file size without compromising image quality—but you’d be surprised how much you can shave off in terms of megabytes before hitting that point.
The second thing worth talking about is whether or not to go with stock images or your own images. The answer is a multifaceted one. Of course, when it comes to pictures of your team or your place of business, you want to go with an image you create. After all, you don’t want people to get a false impression of your business from a stock image. However, at the same time, a picture that is of poor quality is just as damaging to your website’s credibility. In general, the best course of action is that if you have professional photo equipment, use it, or use outside help for important things like the staff section of your website. Other areas or blog posts can be fleshed out with appropriate stock images.
With this in mind, if you are indeed working with a graphic design department to create or modify images for your website and content, make sure that you know how to integrate their work style with your goals. You may not have time to explain the principles of SEO to them, but adding a few basic points you need them to hit with their work can help quite a bit. A few basic modifications even to a stock image can add a more personal touch.
The Relationship Between Images and SEO
Now, what exactly does it mean to have an appropriate image? It all boils down to the importance of keyword cohesion. Let’s use a blog post as an example. Say you were writing about types of roofing material but used a stock photo of a duck. This doesn’t make sense at all, While this is an extreme example, every piece of visual content you need to create needs to be keeping with both your brand as well as the context, the same as with your written content. This is not only for consistency but for keywords as well.
One way to help your pages rank (and even help your images rank in Google Image Search) is through customization. Something as simple as changing the file name for an image you’re going to use could add another instance of a keyword in the back end of your site, and every bit helps. In addition, images also have something called alt tags, which lets you add some alt text to a site. Again, this is something that the average person doesn’t see while browsing your site, but search engines will. The thing about this is that it won’t be nearly as effective for SEO purposes if the alt text isn’t paired with an appropriate image. This is why you don’t want to spam your alt text for each image with 10 keywords, but craft a sentence that incorporates your main keywords and makes sense with the image.
There are other smaller things you can accompany your images with as well. For example, an extended caption can get more readership than the rest of your text. Another example of a small change you can make is anchor text. Changing something from “view image” to “check out some of our past work” can add another keyword and create a more customized look to your website.
One final piece that bears mentioning is that some of these tips are going to differ depending on the type of business site you have. For example, going overboard with high-quality images can slow your site and hurt SEO, as we mentioned before. However, for e-commerce SEO, things differ. Not only is there less text per page for an e-commerce listing rather than a blog, but these images are often the only chance a customer has to see a product before they buy. Here, a small SEO hit may be worth it to put together a better experience, especially since you can pick up the slack in other areas.
Images and SEO in Review
Images are a bit of a middle ground between things like keywords that are directly essential to your social media, and something like social media that can have a profound indirect impact. In fact, images do a little bit of both.
The best thing that you can do when integrating images into your SEO strategy is to try and be prepared early. Knowing how images will factor into your greater SEO concept will give you more time to either source appropriate stock images or work with your graphic design department/freelancer to create images that will appropriately match with your keywords. In addition, if you are tasked with doing these yourself, it will give you time to learn any basics of visual design to create appropriate content. SEO has always been a game of using multiple smaller methods rather than searching for that “silver bullet,” so make sure images are one of those smaller options.
