Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for the design and content of a website are short but sweet. Containing only 10 bullet points, you can be sure that only the most important aspects of on-page optimization are listed. Yet surprisingly, ALT attributes are mentioned not once, but three times and the last bullet point even includes a link to image guidelines.
With the importance search engines place on image optimization, it is shocking to see how many websites don’t utilize the ALT attribute and have poorly named images.
Below is a quick guide to what I consider the “Big Three” of image SEO best practices.
File Name
All file names should be descriptive and informative. Clearly stating what the image contains and utilizing a keyword or two. Image file names should also use hyphens to separate words, since these are treated as spaces in the major search engines. My personal preference is to also keep it no more than five words.
The Good
Big-Agnes-Flycreek-Tent.jpg
The Bad
BigAgnes_FlyCK_23.jpg
The Ugly
IMG04986.JPG
ALT Text
The ALT attribute should describe the image. Remember, ALT text is not just for search engine optimization but is meant for those who can’t see the image in their browser. In other words, this is NOT your opportunity to stuff every keyword you’ve ever wanted to rank for into your ALT text. For example, Danny Dover recommends keeping ALT text under 140 characters, since anything more than that may appear to be spammy.
The Good
alt=”Big Agnes Fly Creek Ultra light Backpacking Tent”
The Bad
(Nothing)
The Ugly
alt=”Backpacking tent, best backpacking tent, ultra light backpacking gear, tent reviews, hiking tents, Big Agnes Fly Creek, two person tent, camping gear, buy outdoor gear, ultra light tents, hiking gear reviews, best camping equipment, best tent for ultra light backpacking”
Surrounding Content
If you would like your image to rank in the image results pages you will want to surround it with relevant content. This becomes apparent if you were to actually perform an image search for the “Big Agnes Fly Creek Tent”. You would be presented with a lot of images of that particular tent and would soon notice that many of those images fall into the Bad and Ugly categories of image SEO. Yet these images are getting indexed because of their surrounding content. If nothing else, this should testify to its importance. Surrounding content should be relevant to the image and provide the search engines with a good idea of what is on the page in general.
The Good
A page has 200 or more words of good quality relevant content. Extra points if you have a caption describing the image.
The Bad
A page with little or no content gives the search engines no context for your images, so getting a photo from a photo gallery page to rank in the image results can be very difficult.
The Ugly
If you want your image of the Big Agnes Backpacking Tent to appear well in the image SERPS, do yourself a favor and don’t place it on a page with content about unicorns and glitter.
Helpful Tools
Checking ALT text and file paths is actually easier then you might think. My favorite tool for this task is the Web Developer browser extension. By choosing “View Image Information” in the “Images” tab you will quickly be able to see every image on a given page with its corresponding ALT attribute and file path.
If you are trying to have your image rank for particular keywords, you can then take the next step of analyzing your surrounding content for relevance. A great tool for this is the SEOmoz On-Page Keyword Optimization tool, which will give your webpage a letter grade for how well it relates to that keyword. You can also have fun with the completely free Latent Dirichlet Allocation tool, which, although in beta, can enable you to see how relevant your text is to keywords.
When creating a web page or a blog post it is so easy to forget about the ALT attributes of the images.
I for one am guilty of focusing so much on the content, title tag, tags, and internal links that by the time I get all that just right I sometimes fail to remember the ALT text.
Thanks for the reminder.
Nicola,
To be honest I rarely use the title attribute for an image because Google has stated that it holds no SEO value (and many SEOs have independently confirmed this).
That being said, I could see it being helpful if it provided useful information to a visitor such as the time, date, or location an image was taken.
In either case I would not consider it a “must have” for image SEO. There are a lot of things you can do to optimize your images even further, such optimizing the file paths, size, and type. However, because their SEO impact is small I chose to focus on “the big three” instead.
Do you also link the images generally? Like to the page it shows on so you have another link or is that not important?
Steve,
You are right, linking to a page an image is on, with relevant anchor text, will also help that image become ranked.
For example, if my image above was on a page dedicated to the Big Agnes Flycreek Tent, and I had inbound links with that anchor text, then it would help that image rank for that keyword.
A few burning questions:
(1) How important would you say the image name is?
I use a lot of id generated images. Once a user uploads a logo or a photo it’s a number. Really convenient server side wise. Is it at all detrimental in SEO? The problem is, I don’t want to go too crazy with the custom file names because then we get into character encoding and the fun that brings…gets really messy and might be more bother than for what it’s worth. I’d for sure use the alt attributes for these images, and the user generated content takes care of the context part. I suppose just the context and the alt tag would tell the SE what the image is.
(2) For images used in the layout(may times over) does it annoy Google if I use an alt tag for the site logo, and change it for locations, for example: I really don’t see the harm. Google probably ignores most of the layout elements anyways in the long run.
Clinton
Clinton, again good questions
1. Poorly optimized images will not hurt your website, they just wont help that much either. The way I see it, the purpose of Image SEO is two-fold; (1) to give us a little bump in the SERPS by improving the relevancy of a web-page for a keyword and (2) to have visitors access our site through Image search.
In your case I wouldn’t worry too much. If you could automatically assign the images the same name as the title of the business that is uploading it, or even the same name as the Alt attribute that would be preferable. But if you are unable to do that I wouldn’t fret, since we all know that user uploaded content will never be perfectly optimized for SEO.
2. Changing the Alt Attribute to incorporate a page specific keyword doesn’t sound like a problem to me either.
Christian, thanks again.
Yes – I agree. User generated content is hard to optimize. One problem being the time it takes to write and test the code for fetching keyword identified images. It’s possible of course but if I’m going to spend 5 hours on it, I’d rather use the time more productively.
Thanks, your response helps!
Clinton
Well, given that most people believe that SEO is some sort of SEO BEAST…. it would be easily understood when someone makes this simple mistakes.
Personally, I know it took me a while to wrap my head around the proper way to tag a picture (like 5 months).
But for those who take these simple bullet points to heart, it could really provide some additional exposure in no time.
Thanks for keeping it real, I’ll be back!
-Dereck
Christian,
I completely concur with your thoughts on the guidelines for SEO. Too often, creators will make the mistake of diverting from a product’s relevance. While this is detrimental in text ads, it’s even worse when incorporating images as conciseness is key.
Christian,
Is there anything specific to Local SEO image search? What about adding GPS info to local photos? Will that help SEO enough to be worth it? (not using a cell phone camera, so GPS has to be added after the fact)
Thanks!
Hello, Christian!
All great thoughts, but what I am most curious about is how unique alt text and title (should one choose to use them despite claims it’s not useful for SEO) are supposed to be. For example, if I am uploading twenty images from a single photoshoot onto my photography website, the titles are going to be pretty much the same. Do I need to add numeric sequences for Google not to consider it spam, potentially? Do I need unique alt text for every images, even for those that are quite similar?
I have tried to scoop what my competitors are doing (there are tools for it for those who are newbies at this whole SEO and technical website thing, like me; I used https://domsumup.com and, hoping you won’t consider it spam, I must say those human-written insights and comments that they offer next to each metric are life savers for beginners like me). Unfortunately (and quite fortunately if I manage to optimize my website), few of them seem to bother with image optimization, so I never really got a clear idea of how to handle it.
I am subscribing to this and hoping to hear from you! Thanks again,
Sarah