You may not be aware that adding images to your articles and blog posts actually add value to your SEO. There are a number of ways you can optimise your images to do this by following our SEO guidelines.

Compress your images

Compressing your images allows your sites pages to load faster and is therefore essential to optimise your mobile experience. Did you know 40% of people will leave a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load? That’s definitely a statistic that shouldn’t be taken lightly. When compressing images, we like TinyPNG. You won’t lose image quality and you can upload up to 20 images at a time providing they are under 5MB.

Re-size

Where needed, re-size your images. You may be using a site which automatically scales your image down to a certain dimension. For example 1080×1920 pixels. However, you may have uploaded your image at 4000×3000 pixels. The size of that image will still need to be loaded to your page. Re-sizing your image to the correct dimensions will decrease your loading times and increase user experience.

Rename your files

Renaming your files allows Google to know what your image is about. This is an important factor in image SEO as this is one of the first places Google looks. Having an image named IMG_1090.jpg is not going to be helpful to your site. Instead, think about what is in the image. The image could be of a motocross bike rider in the middle of a jump. So you could use an image name of motocross-bike-rider-jumping.jpg.

Use alt text

Using alt text on your images is helpful as it adds descriptive information for search engine crawlers as they navigate your site. It is also useful to visually impaired users to tell them what is on the image, and when the image link is broken. It is important to remember that alt text should be kept below 100 characters. Google will use this alt text, not only to determine what the image is, but also what the text around the image is telling us. So it is a great place to put your keyword!