When it comes to SEO, many people think only of text or technical parameters. We sometimes forget the importance of visual aspects and images. So how can you ensure that your images are perfectly optimized for SEO? Answer below!
Choose the right keywords to describe your photos
Let’s imagine that, with Christmas just around the corner, you want to sell a number of decorative accessories and Christmas trees. To illustrate your new products, you choose a beautiful photo of a fir tree. Fir, or Christmas tree? Or Christmas tree? Plastic or natural? Live and ready to plant after the holidays, or cut and delivered in its own bag, ready to be recycled? As you can see, a “simple” tree isn’t as easy to describe in terms of SEO keywords. For your SEO purposes, Keyword Planner can help you find the keywords best suited to your target clientele. If you’re targeting individuals, you won’t of course use the same words as if you’re a fir grower looking to target small and medium-sized businesses or supermarkets that sell retail fir trees.
Be careful with file names
Apart from the descriptions that accompany your photos, you also need to think about the names you use to name your files. No, the date on which the photo was taken won’t help Google. On the other hand, “sapin.jpg” is already a more useful name. But here again, think of the customers who will be searching on Google image. If your photo appears in the first results, they’ll be much more likely to visit your site. So stay consistent with the keywords you choose for your web page, and use compatible or similar keywords to name your file. Between cheap Christmas trees and cheap artificial Christmas trees, do you know which generates more requests? I’ll leave you to research these keywords to find out how to optimize your images for SEO.
Don’t forget your photo caption!
How can an SEO-optimized photo caption help you? Quite simply, it’s an additional field in which you can use useful keywords! Let’s take our famous Christmas tree again: make sure your keyword is useful for both a human reader and Google’s robots. It’s up to you to decide between Christmas tree and Christmas tree, depending on the impact it will have on your brand image… We could go on and on about the technical aspects (photo weight, resolution, file formats, sitemap, etc.), but there’s already a lot to be done with the textual aspects alone to optimize your images for SEO. For the rest, good practice also means staying consistent, and for that it’s crucial to call on a good webmaster. And you, what techniques do you systematically apply to ensure that your photos are optimized in the best possible way?
