How do I create SEO friendly images for my blog posts?

Why do we all need to host SEO friendly images on our web pages? Simply because having SEO friendly images which are well-optimized for the search engines can drive you more traffic not only from Google’s image search but via improved overall web performance of your site. So, how to optimize any visual content, for example, images for a blog post? Let’s see.

When working on SEO friendly images, you should be looking at the following three targets:

• Shaping a proper image file name;
• Compressing image files for faster page loading speed and better visual performance;
• Adding the right Alt tags to your images.

Choosing a proper name for your image files

First of all, you should name your images properly. I mean you should forget those dumb file names, such as DS1234567.png, or any crude naming like that. I suggest acting proactively so that you will never have to go for a time-consuming effort searching for every item of your image page content all over again. So, if you are a beginner in SEO, you’d better start moving on the right track from the very beginning. That way, I recommend including one main keyword of top-relevancy into each image title of yours. Note, however, that you should use no more than three words when naming your images (the keywords are also counted!). Here is one pretty good example of a proper name for SE friendly images, for instance, to be landed on your blog pages: professional_seo_checklist.png.

Optimizing your image files

Next, you will need to optimize your image files by compressing them for a faster page loading speed, as well as better visual performance, and hence improved user browsing experience. The first thing to be done here is to prevent such an unfortunate situation when everything ends up with a too heavy website or blog post. That’s why before uploading images to your site you should resize them, at the same time without paying with their visual quality. To compress your images to a smaller size for faster page loading speed and maintain their quality I recommend using an easy visual editor like TinyPNG, or any other online tool available in open access. Once you resized your image files, you can simply drop them directly into your website or blog post.

Working on image Alt tags

At last, to have fully SEO friendly images, you should fill-in the right Alt attributes inside them. In fact, the search engines (like Google itself) are unable to understand any visual page content, unless it’s embedded with Alt tag text description. From the viewpoint of better user experience, a classical example of image Alt tags is a CTA-buttons like “BUY NOW” showing a text message before you click them. To work on your image Alt tags manually, I recommend applying for a complete HTML image tag. That way, replace the “src” section with your image URL. At last, add your own title and the image Alt text itself.

As you see, making SEO friendly images will not take too much effort. However, if you are still getting by without well-optimized visual content, I highly recommend paying some time to have everything done in full. That would be a wise investment in your overall website ranking promotion, I’m sure.