Adding Website Images is as simple as pressing ‘add new’ and then selecting files to upload. But to get the added benefit of Image SEO plus to ensure your site is loading fast, this is a little trickier and has a few steps involved.

Image SEO isn’t a difficult task but it can make a difference to your traffic, rankings and search visibility.

Properly optimised photographs will assist your page loading faster. Page speed is part of on-page SEO so these steps will assist your page with organic search and also help your photos in being listed in google images search which can bring in additional traffic.

Image optimisation becomes a habit the more you do it. It takes a little more time but it’s worth it.

We always want to do as many things as possible for our clients to rank better and bring in more website hits.

Image File Types:

.jpg or .jpeg for photographs
.svg for icons
.png for logos and graphics with a transparent background
WebP is a relatively new file type and we recommend serving WebP to assist your Image SEO and page rankings

The Minx Team always laughed about my image SEO mantra is stuck in everyone’s brain for life

“Rename, Resize, Optimise”
Creating a great User Experience (UX) is an important part of SEO

The 5 steps to adding website images

Before uploading an image to your website it is best to resize, rename and optimise it as this will help with your Image SEO, your UX and your page load speed.

1. Resize

Be sure to resize images to their maximum display dimensions. We use the following sizes:

For a Blog featured image, I use 1290px wide. As that’s the page width I generally use when building a website.
For Landscape Landscape I use 1600px wide
For Portrait Images I use a minimum of 900px wide.

There are quite a few tools you can use to resize images including the photos application that comes with Windows (it’s super easy & fast to use), Photoshop and some people resize using Canva.

2. Rename

The Image name should be named as the target Keyword of the page.

A unique name is better than something generic like 123789846.jpg. The image name is an opportunity to target the keyword.

Use a – to separate words.

For example, our home page target Keyword is ‘Lx2 Agency’ so we use minx-digital.jpg and if there are multiple images I use a number so the file name would be minx-digital-1.jpg

Google has published a guide of its own image best practices

3. Optimise

Large Images slow down your page load time and nobody likes a slow webpage.

Optimise before and after adding a file to your web page.

Before

When you resize the file the size will be smaller but you can optimise further by using optimisation tools such as https://tinypng.com/ which is an excellent free tool.

You want the file size to be the smallest file size possible but you want the resolution to be high quality. We aim for a file size of under 100KB wherever we can but sometimes an image can’t be that small and keep the resolution so it may need to be bigger

Adobe has a good article on Image Resolution which is a good read if you aren’t sure what resolution means.

Upload into the media library:

In WordPress go into the Media Gallery and press Add New

After

In WordPress.org add an image optimisation plugin. There are many to choose from with popular ones being Ewww, ShortPixel, Imagify or Smush. These plugins help minimise file sizes even further.

Having a high-quality photo as small as possible size is exactly what you want.

4. Add Alt Text

Alternative text that shows in case the image can’t be shown to the user for many reasons, is also needed for accessibility for the visually impaired + it helps google to understand what the photo is about.

Basically, Google is blind & cannot see your image but google reads content and code so can read ALT Text.

Be Descriptive and Specific
Alt text should always describe the contents of an image in as much detail as possible.
The more specific you can be when describing an image, the better, as this will help it rank on Google Image Search and also help visually impaired people better understand the content on your page.
Be Relevant
Alt tags aren’t a place to spam keywords and should be used to describe the file such as ‘Lara P Digital Home Page Hero’
Try and write alt text that describes the photo in a way that relates to your page
Be Unique
Don’t use your page’s main target keyword as the alt tag for every Alt Text. If there are 5 photos use a different variation of the keyword such as Lx2 Agency Home Page Hero, Lx2 Agency Pink Website, Lx2 Agency Solutions etc

Always be sure to write unique alt text that describes the specific contents of the image

5. Geotag your image

This is probably the most underused image SEO tactic. You can literally connect your photos to locations by Geo-tagging them. This is amazing if you are doing local SEO as your blog posts will then rank locally.

Geo Imgr is a handy tool to do this

Whilst it isn’t a ranking factor Geotagging can be helpful

6. Implement Lazy Loading on your website

We can’t ignore the fact that photos are usually the assets on a page with the largest file size and, therefore, slow down your page. It’s unavoidable.

You can’t have a great website without photos. They are too important to provide clients with what they are looking for and provide a great user experience.

They make your website more engaging, pleasing and useful to a user.

By using lazy loading we defer a browser from loading an image until it is needed.

We use WPRocket for this task and include this plugin with all my website maintenance plans. It’s a fantastic WordPress cache plugin for many speed-related tasks.

So there you have it, my top 6 steps for adding Images to your website and Image SEO.

I hope you found this blog helpful

Until next time