Optimize Your Images & Write Alt Text Like A Pro
Search engine crawlers index the information on a website to determine its relevance for its users. As part of your SEO strategy, you want to make sure all the elements on your website are labelled and organized correctly so that search engines can easily identify what your site is about.
The images on your website and blog posts need some love too when it comes to search engine optimization.
Luckily, you can consider image optimization as low hanging fruit to improve your website’s visibility in search results.
Here are some tips you can use today to improve your site’s image optimization.
Reduce The File Size
SEO is all about creating a better user experience.
While having crisp, high-quality images are important for communicating your visual branding and providing context to your written blog post, massive image files slow down your site loading time—which makes for a frustrating experience.
Reducing the size of the image is different from reducing the file size.
What you don’t want to do is make the image size too small because it will stretch and pixelate when you upload it.
Instead, you want to compress the file size without compromising the quality.
Photoshop has a “save image for web” option that preserves the high quality while compressing the file size, but there are free online apps that can do this too like reduceimages.com.
Name Your Image File
Don’t leave your image file as the default “DCS1231231.jpg” non-sense.
If you have the time to change the name your camera gives your image to some keyboard vomit like “sdjasldjalskda.jpg”, then you have time to properly name your image file.
And you should! It’s a super easy step to improving your on-page SEO.
Let’s say you have an interior design business and a blog post about decorating your home for the fall. Instead of naming banner image for this post “pumpkins-fall-pumpkins-03.jpg, name the image something relevant and descriptive around 2–5 words like “farmhouse-fall-pumpkin-decor.jpg”
Ok, you’ve got your image files compressed and named appropriately, now you want to write alt text.
WTF Is Alt Text?
Alt text is short for alternative text, or sometimes called alternative descriptions, alt tags, or alt tribute.
Its main function is to make the content on your site accessible to visually impaired visitors using screen-reading programs for a more user-friendly experience.
Adding alt text to your images also helps your page become more SEO-friendly — which is why we're here, right?
This short text (125-ish characters) narrates the image for the crawler and visually impaired visitors.
Search engine crawlers don't see images and rely on these descriptive texts to understand visual elements on a page. Keeping this in mind, it makes sense that pictures with optimized alt tags are more likely to populate in image searches.
Let's get into some best practices for writing alt text descriptions that will take your content's SEO up a notch.
Integrate Keywords In Your Alt Description
Even if you've just scratched the surface of SEO, you'll know how important keywords are for improving your content's search engine ranking.
Keywords are words or phrases in your content that make it possible for people to search your website using search engines.
The alt text on an image is an excellent place to insert your keywords because search engine crawlers index the images based on what you write in this section.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing
While you may be tempted to do this from the philosophy that more keywords = more exposure, keyword stuffing isn't really helpful to anyone.
Just don't do it. It looks spammy, and search engines hate it.
Because most readers who visit your site won't notice the alt text, I've come across webpages that have stuffed keywords onto their images to increase their keyword count.
Search engines are getting smarter and smarter. They can tell when keyword stuffing is evident, and it can lead to a search penalty, hurting your site ranking.
Here's an example of keyword stuffing an alt description for the image below:
analog photography film photos camera film cameras learn analog photography film photography tips
Accurately Describe What You See
Search engine crawlers don't see images the way we do, so we'll have to do our best to describe what's in the picture succinctly.
Alt tags are usually restricted to 125 or so characters. Make the most use of this space by using descriptive words in a complete sentence.
Not sure what to write?
Don't overthink it. Write what you see.
If you were to read your alt image description to someone with their eyes closed, they should imagine an accurately similar picture.
Here’s how I would write the alt text:
Minolta XG-M film camera 50 mm 1.7 lens on top of an analog photography book with rolls of film.
Your alt tags should relate to the content you’ve written on the page. Since the foliage and plants in the background are purely decorative elements, I chose to leave them out of the alt tag and focused primarily on the camera and objects related to photography.
Make Adding Alt Text Part Of Your Image Uploading Process
Writing alt text is an easy win for improving your on-page SEO. Make it part of your uploading process, so you don't miss any images.
Here's my peek into my process…
After I've edited my article, I'll go through and insert notes on where I'd like to add an image. Then I'll either get a stock image or take my own photos for my post.
Once I have my photos chosen, I'll go through and write all the alt descriptions in a batch in Grammarly as part of my final editing process.
As I'm uploading the article and notice my notes to upload images, I copy and paste the descriptions along with it, et voila! Alt text is done and dusted.
Let's Sum Up These Tid-Bits
High-quality images and well-written alt text improves user experience, accessibility, and on-page SEO. If you can include image optimization as part of your blog posting process, the better your SEO strategy will be moving forward.
How do you optimize images?
Reduce the file size
Name the image file appropriately
Write alt text for all your images
Create a fool-proof process to make sure you don’t miss writing alt text for your images going forward
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