SEO TIPS: Image SEO – How Important Is It?

When most people think of SEO, images are not usually high on their priority list. The problem with that thinking is that they should be. Images of some sort are used on nearly every page you’ll find on any site you stumble across. Usually, multiple images are in play. What you need to keep in mind is that images are a powerful tool in your climb toward reaching your SEO goals. Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about images and SEO and get you up to speed with what you need to know to take care of business the right way!

The first step in working with images on your website is that they should all be appropriately named and tagged. Far too many webmasters are careless when it comes to this important step, which shows how careless people are regarding website design and SEO basics. If you choose to downplay or ignore the potential of images for SEO, you are choosing to do worse in the SERPs than you have to. Who would choose that?

It’s easy to find images that are named as image1, image2, etc, or some similar Mickey Mouse type of system. We see this on a regular basis in companies whose SEO firm ignored the potential available. Although you will not be penalized for naming your images in the above fashion, to do so is to ignore the industry’s best practices. Think of it like seeing a hundred dollar bill on the ground and choosing not to pick it up because you don’t think you need it.

If you name your images in a manner that reflects what they are, in future if you need to tweak results or to find and replace them completely, you can easily find those images. Using an orderly system of naming images helps your SEO in the following way: Images give you yet another chance to include your keyword in a strategic position of the website! That alone is a huge deal!

In quite a few cases, the header of the page is an image and the leftmost corner shows the logo of the company. It’s not a rule, just the norm. By having keywords in such strategic places, you  can improve your page relevancy to for searches. For this reason alone, you always want to include your site/brand name with your images.

Usually, the page header will be the same across all of your pages so you will be naming the same image in each page. In situations like that, the keyword you have used in one page may not suit the other page, meaning you have a mismatch. There is a simple way to deal with this that will really deliver a big bang for your buck.

Save the image under multiple names. Use the correctly named  image on each page; nut change the keywords for each page as needed. This won’t impact the visual appearance at all. Your visitors will see the same image on each page, but for the search engines, the keyword will keep changing with each page in a way that matches with the content of the page. This gives you a superb opportunity to work in as many of your relevant keywords on each page as possible without appearing spammy in any way.

If you have a big website or use more than the average amount of images on each page, you should create sub-folders within the images folder and categorize images according to the nature of each image. When you are creating sub-folders, use your keywords for folder names as well. This will make everything easy to find anytime you need to make changes or if you want to re-use an image elsewhere. If your keywords made of more than one word (if they are key phrases instead of keywords) then you can use hyphens or underscores to separate words.

You should be able to handle your images with ease anytime you want to make any changes to your website so long as you have a consistent system for managing them in place. Your SEO firm should be in synch with your web designer, with optimization suggestions passed on to the web design team to set up your website for the best possible search engine performance. If everyone is working together, you will have a good looking and good ranking site with exceptional SEO.