Getting images crawled and ranked is important. That’s because search engines will embed images right in the regular search results:
Image in SEO search results
It’s a lot easier to rank for an image than it is for an article. Succeed and you can leapfrog past lots of other rankings. You can make that happen, and get better clickthru when it does happen, by taking a few really simple steps.
Compress your images.
First, if you are responsible for formatting your images, compress them! Look at this image:
Frog: 115 kb
And then this image:
Frog image: 18 kb
It’s 18 kb.It’ll load faster, which means more people will use it (because they don’t have to wait). It also means search engines are more likely to index the image.
Resize your images in an editor
You also need to resize images in a photo editor, not using the height and width attribute.
I see many cases where an image that’s 300 x 300 pixels (dots) on a page is actually a 600 x 600 pixel image that’s been scaled in the HTML itself.
Your content management system probably lets you scale images by a % or specific dimensions when you insert them into your articles. But most of those systems don’t actually resize the image – they don’t take the original file, smush it down, and then save that as a new, smaller file. Instead, they wedge the original file into a smaller space by using some code: The height and width attributes of the IMG element. I won’t nerd out about it – you can look that up if you need to.
When that happens, the page still delivers the humungous image file. Visiting browsers and search engines have to take the time to download an image that’s larger than necessary in both dimensions and file size.
And, visiting search engines can’t properly classify the image. Google and other engines classify images by dimension. If you scale your images in the HTML code, you’re forcing the search engines to take an extra step. Why do that? Don’t!
Use images where the subject is clearly visible
In the example below, the image on the right is far better than the image on the left:
The image on the right is superior for image SEO
Some folks think search engines are already able to recognize animals and such in images. I don’t believe it for a second. However, they definitely look for colors, and armies of volunteers tag images by hand. The easier it is to quickly interpret the image, the more likely it is that it’ll get properly tagged.
Use fully descriptive file names
Next, if the content management system you’re using lets you name the image when you insert it into the article, give it a fully descriptive file name. If you’re uploading images by hand, then you have no excuse: Always use a fully descriptive file name. Fully descriptive means that, if you write it on a blank sheet of paper, the file name will tell a perfect stranger what the image will show.
Do this:
elephant-in-africa-06252010.jpg
not this:
a230498124asdfasdfawe4908234.jpg
You can use the date to keep them original. Search engines use the file names as one descriptive signal. This one’s almost purely about search, it’s true, but it’s pretty important.
Note that I used dashes? Search engines recognize dashes as word separators. They don’t recognize underscores or anything else. Don’t use spaces, either.
Use a fully descriptive ALT attribute
And, make sure you fully describe the image in its ALT attribute.
The ALT attribute is literally the alternate description of an image. It’ll show up if, for whatever reason, a visiting browser doesn’t download the image. It’s also used by search engines to categorize images.
Remember the blank sheet of paper test? If you write your ALT attribute on a blank sheet of paper and show it to a stranger, they should know what the image is about.
For the image below, “Sheep saying web 2.0″ is a good ALT attribute. “Weird sheep” is not:
Sheep. Saying web 2.0. What more can I say?
The ALT tag, if you type it into the raw HTML code, would look like this:
<img src="images/sheep-web-20.jpg" ALT="Sheep saying web 2.0" width="552" height="369">
If you’re using a content management system like WordPress, your image upload screen will have a field called “ALT”, “Alternate” or something like “Summary”. If it doesn’t, chances are the image caption or title will automatically be used.
The ALT tag contents can affect regular SEO, too. So it makes sense to do a good job with it.
Describe the image in the caption
Always use the key phrase in the image caption, and in the text surrounding the image. That shouldn’t be hard – if the image is relevant content, then the key phrase should fit right in. If it doesn’t, something’s wrong, and you need to rethink the image a bit.
Tools
If you don’t already have a desktop tool that you like to use for image editing, try either of these. Both of them will let you resize and compress an image using only your web browser, and both will do it in under 60 seconds:
ShrinkPictures.com
ImageOptimizer.net
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