How to Boost Your Blog SEO with a Simple Image Hack
How’s your blog’s search engine optimization (SEO) looking?
There are several things you should do to the text in your blog posts to optimize them, including putting your keywords in your headline, but another, frequently overlooked way to boost your SEO is to optimize your images.
One of the quickest and most effective hacks is to simply rename your images using keywords and clear language.
Generally, when you upload an image to your computer, you end up with an image name like DC002347564. This means nothing to a Google robot indexing your site and it does nothing to further your SEO cause.
Instead, give that image a clear name that includes your keywords. For instance, when I uploaded the following image, it had the name “photo-1423483641154.JPG.”
For the post I included it in, I changed the name to How-to-Prevent-Food-Waste.JPG. The longtail keyword phrase we were trying to be found in Google for is, “How to prevent food waste,” so I made sure to include those keywords in the image name.
Notice how I broke up each word with a hyphen? That’s how Google recommends naming your image files for optimal search engine indexing. It’s clear, easy to read, and descriptive.
While we’re on the topic of blog images and SEO, you should also use the “alt” tag, image title, and, if appropriate, caption.
These things, which are found in the editing options in most content management systems (CMS) when you load an image into your blog, also boost your SEO by clearly telling search engines what your post is about.
For the alt and title, use the same format as you did with naming the image. If your image is of a surfer on West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz, and your post is about the best surf spots in California, you might use the following: best-surf-spots-in-Santa-Cruz-West-Cliff-Drive.
See how the keywords are in there, but also a description of where the surf spot is? Think of your images in terms of keywords and robots, and how search engines see your posts and you’ll be ahead of the pack.
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Comments
Is is really necessary to use the hyphens in alt tags and title tags? I understand the use of hyphen when naming the file because it makes sense. But alt tags etc are used by third party software ( ones that support blind reading etc ) so it might not make sense to hyphens in them.
Hi Nishadha
On researching your question, I found that, as the alt tag was originally designed to improve web accessibility, and is now widely used for SEO, you can either use hyphens or not.
Some SEO experts advise using hyphens, while other suggest writing just as a reader would want to see the text—for example: Santa Cruz beach, instead of Santa-Cruz-beach.
What are your thoughts?
Cheers,
Cat
Nice article Cat, I’ve been using this one for a while. Although it seems links still run the show, little stuff like this can only help!
Hi Fred
Yes! Quality backlinks are great. And, as you pointed out, with SEO, every little bit helps. It only makes sense to be as clear and descriptive with naming your images, to get the SEO boost, as opposed to having an image named IMG23463874712. 🙂
Cheers,
Cat
Loved the article.
Such an intelligent article, everyone will be helped from it. I was using images in the most lame way possible but now I will do it in a better way.
This is a good article. We have to apply even the most minute things to our SEO campaign as this might be the deciding factor in our campaign’s success.
Carey
Even in the SEO starter guide written by Google itself has mentioned this tip. Including ALT tag in the image makes your website more search engine friendly and give more website traffic from Image search!
Another tip that can be added onto this is geotagging your images if you’re working with or have your own geo location to add extra relevancy.
Very well explained. I really appreciate the insight here in this post and confident it’s going to be helpful to me and many others. Thanks for sharing all the information.
Every little bit helps. These tips are a great help.
https://www.smartermax.co.uk/
I have been going through your blog and found this post really useful. I’ll definitely follow the mentioned tips. Thanks for sharing amazing blog post here.