Optimising Web Images for SEO

Posting a page-long text on a website is not too inviting; it often never gets read by Net users. That is why photos and drawings, along with various other media elements, are widely used to engage website visitors and hold their attention.

The role of images though is not only limited to capturing people's interest and encouraging them to browse the portal further. They can also help a site achieve higher rankings on search engines. So now, the question is: how do you effectively optimise pictures for SEO purposes? Read on and learn.

Choose photos that are contextual and relevant. This means that you use only photographs that support the article you have written; they should be related to the keywords you are trying to optimise. For example, if your texts are about Computer-Aided Design software, your chosen pictures should be able to tell visitors right away that the written content of the page is indeed about CAD applications.

Label your image files correctly. For you to be able to do this, you need to have a list of your targeted keywords on hand. This is because you are going to use these as document names. For example, if your photos are about scuba-diving in Malaysia, you may save it as "malaysia-scuba-diving.jpg."

Keep in mind that when labelling such kinds of files, use dashes to separate individual words in a phrase instead of underscores. This is because search engines generally consider the latter as an alphanumeric character, while they consider dashes as spaces.

Use descriptive alt text and title. These will provide alternative and additional information sources for the people visiting your site as well as for the search engine crawlers. The first particularly describes what the image is about; it shows up when pictures are disabled or have failed to load. The second, meanwhile, just provides additional data on the photos shown on the webpage.

Optimising pictures for search engines can indeed make a difference to the ranking of your website, so make it a habit choose the right photos and label them correctly.

On another note, if you like to streamline and improve your product development process by having virtual images of it, learn how to use CAD software. Get in touch with Applied Graphics to get started.