Adding Website Images & Image SEO

Adding Website Images may be as simple as pressing ‘add new’ and then selecting files to upload. But to ensure your site is fast loading and gets the added benefit of Image SEO, this is a little trickier and has a few steps involved.

Image SEO isn’t a difficult task but it can make a difference to 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 more website hits.

Image File Types:

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

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”

The 5 steps to adding website images

Before uploading an image to your website it is best to resize, rename and optimise 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 is a landscape image so I use 1920px width x 1280px,
• Landscape (Hero Image) 1920px width x 1280px height.
• For portrait, I use a minimum of 1000px width and my preference is 1500 height.
• WooCommerce Product Image 600px Square.
• Favicon 512px x 512px

There are quite a few tools you can use 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

The Image name should be named as 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 the size will be smaller but you can optimise further by using optimisation tools such as https://tinyjpg.com/ which is 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 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.

Learn more about WebP Images on the google developers website.

Having a high-quality photo as small as possible size is exactly what you want.

4. Add Alt Text

Alternative text that shows in case the image can’t be shown to the user for many reasons, is also needed for accessibility for the visually impaired + for it helps google to understand what the photo is about.

Basically, Google is blind & cannot see your image but Google reads content and code so 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 also 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 variation of the keyword 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. You can literally connect your photos to locations by Geo-tagging them. This is amazing if you are doing local SEO as your blog posts will then rank locally.

Geo Imgr is a handy tool to do this

Whilst it isn’t a ranking factor Geotagging can be helpful

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 useful 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 list all my favourite tools on my tools and resources page and have written a thorough post on why site speed matters.

I hope you found this blog helpful

Until next time