Have you ever thought about how and why certain images come up in Google search results for a specific produce or service you are searching?
I had the opportunity to sit down with Susan Hamilton, host of The OffBeat Business Show and talk about the what, why and how of SEO recently and this was a hot topic. Businesses want and need to learn everything then can about search engine optimization (SEO) and how to optimize their content and images to rank on the first page of Google.
One of the takeaways for Susan was how often business owners (and web designers) neglect or underutilize the photos and other images they put on websites. The files names of the images you upload to your website pages and blog posts really do matter. We have all at some point just uploaded an image that came out of our camera or smartphone without putting in the extra effort to give it a proper file name. The output would like something like dsc3759.jpg. This adds no SEO value to your website or content on the website.
Using the example “cute kittens” if you go to Google and run a search you would get millions of results. This doesn’t happen by accident. People actually name those images cute kittens.
One listener, Donna R., put my example to use and e-mailed me after the show:
“After listening in on your radio interview, I did a Google search on cute kittens: About 4,790,000 results (0.28 seconds). Then I did a search on Photo 1.jpeg: About 6,530,000,000 results (0.63 seconds) Please note: That is 6 Billion. LOL”
So what did Donna learn about image file names? They are important and not everyone realizes that. How does this help Donna? She will now take the extra two minutes to rename a image and her images will appear in search results when her competitors images will not.
How To Optimize Your Images for Google Search Results
- Save the image off your camera or smartphone to your computer.
- Rename your image to something of value that defines the content, product or service discussed on the page.
- Upload the image to your website and define the ALT Text for the photos. If you are using WordPress, you can do this when adding your photos to a post or page.
You will want the photo name and alt text to clearly define what the photo is about. If the photo is of your product or service, it needs to use that in the name and the alt text. As you can see in the example, the name of the image is “cute_kitten-Oliver_the_SEO_cat.jpg” and the Alt Text is similar.
Visit The OffBeat Business Show if you haven’t already and learn about the other SEO goodness we discussed besides “cute kittens”.
And if you have any questions about the naming of your images and defining the Alt Text or any other aspects of Search Engine Optimization please feel free to contact me.