Adding Website Images & Image SEO

Adding Website Images may be as simple as pressing ‘add new’ and then selecting files to upload.

We all know that fast websites are important for conversions, so to ensure your site is fast loading and gets the added benefit of Image SEO, adding website images is a little trickier and involves a few steps.

Image SEO isn’t difficult, but it can significantly improve your traffic, rankings, and search visibility.

Properly optimised photographs will assist your page loading faster. Page speed is part of on-page SEO, so these steps will assist your page with organic search and also help your photos in being listed in Google images search, which can bring in additional traffic.

Image optimisation becomes a habit the more you do it. It takes a little more time, but it’s worth it. I always want to do as many things as possible for my clients to rank better and bring in as much website traffic as possible.

Before we begin the steps, let’s discuss image types and what you should use when and where.

Image File Types

• .jpg or .jpeg is for photographs
• .svg for icons
• .png for logos and graphics with a transparent background
• WebP is a relatively new file type, I recommend using WebP to assist your image SEO and page rankings

The 5 steps to adding website images

Amongst those who know me well, it is always laughed about that my image SEO mantra is stuck in everyone’s brain for life “Rename, Resize, Optimise”

Before uploading an image to your website, it is best to resize, rename, and optimise it, as this will help with your Image SEO, your UX, and your page load speed.

1. Resize

Be sure to resize images to their maximum display dimensions advised by your WordPress theme or website builder.
I use the following sizes for this website as recommended by my theme.

• For a Blog-featured image, I use 1200px width with 630px height.
• Landscape (Hero Image) 1920px width x 1280px height.
• For portrait, I use a minimum of 1000px width and prefer 1500 height.
• WooCommerce Product Image 600px Square.
• Favicon 512px x 512px

You can use many tools to resize images, including the photos application that comes with Windows (it’s super easy & fast to use), Photoshop, and some people resize using Canva.

If you would like to know the theme, plugins and hosting I used to build this website, check out my tools and resources page

2. Rename

I name the image the target keyword of the page.

A unique name is better than something generic like 123789846.jpg. The image name is an opportunity to target the keyword.

Use – to separate words and I always do images in lowercase.

For example, my home page target keyword is ‘larap digital’ so I use larap-digital.jpg and if there are multiple images I use a number so the file name would be larap-digital-1.jpg

Google has published a guide of its own image best practices

3. Optimise

Large images slow down your page load time, and nobody likes a slow webpage.

Optimise before and after adding an image file to your web page.

Before Upload

When you resize the file, it will be smaller, but you can optimise it further by using optimization tools such as https://tinyjpg.com/, an excellent free tool.

You want the file size to be the smallest file size possible but you want the resolution to be high quality. I aim for a file size of under 100KB wherever I can but sometimes an image can’t be that small and keep the resolution, so it may need to be bigger

Upload into the media library:

In WordPress, go into the Media Gallery and press Add New

After Upload

In WordPress.org, add an image optimisation plugin and use WebP images.

There are many to choose from with popular ones being Ewww, ShortPixel, Imagify or Smush. These plugins help minimise file sizes even further. I personally use Ewww Image Optimizer as I like their Easy IO CDN + it serves WebP images.

Having a high-quality photo that is as small as possible is precisely what you want.

4. Add Alt Text

Alternative text that shows the image in case it can’t be shown to the user for many reasons is also needed for accessibility for the visually impaired and to help Google understand the photo.

Basically, Google is blind and cannot see your image, but it can read content and code and can read ALT Text.

• Be Descriptive and Specific
  Alt text should always describe the contents of an image in as much detail as possible.
  The more specific you can be when describing an image, the better, as this will help it rank on Google Image Search and help visually impaired people better understand the content on your page.
• Be Relevant
  Alt tags aren’t a place to spam keywords and should be used to describe the file, such as ‘Lara P Digital Home Page Hero’
  Try and write alt text that describes the photo in a way that relates to your page
• Be Unique
  Don’t use your page’s main target keyword as the alt tag for every Alt Text. If there are 5 photos, use a different keyword variation such as LaraP Digital Home Page Hero, LaraP Digital Pink Website, LaraP Digital Solutions etc.
  
  Always be sure to write unique alt text that describes the specific contents of the image.

5. Geotag your image

This is probably the most underused image SEO tactic. Geo-tagging allows you to connect your photos to locations. This is amazing if you do local SEO, as it can help you rank locally.

Geo Imgr is a handy tool for doing this.

While it isn’t a ranking factor, geotagging can be helpful if local SEO is part of your digital strategy.

6. Implement Lazy Loading on your website

We can’t ignore the fact that photos are usually the assets on a page with the largest file size and, therefore, slow down your page. It’s unavoidable. 

You can’t have a great website without photos. They are too important to provide clients with what they are looking for and provide a great user experience.

They make your website more engaging, pleasing and helpful to a user.

By using lazy loading, we defer a browser from loading an image until it is needed.

I use WPRocket for this task and include this plugin with all my website maintenance plans. It’s a fantastic WordPress cache plugin for many speed-related tasks.

So there you have it, my top 6 steps for adding Images to your website and Image SEO.

I am obsessed with site speed, and I list all my favourite tools on my tools and resources page. I have also written a thorough post explaining why site speed matters.

I hope you found this blog helpful

Until next time