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How to optimise images for SEO purposes
Monday, April 6, 2015
Images are a very important element in any website. However their importance does not stop at the visual element. The properties of the images themselves must be optimised, so that the website in itself benefits from higher rankings in search engines.
Below you can find some tips on how to optimise your images:
File Name
The file name of an image provides important information that aids search engines understanding what they are about. It is very important that one identifies the main keywords of the article, and then you try and incorporate them within the file name. Also it is very important that words are separated either with a hyphen of else with underscores.
File Size
The speed of a website is a very important factor with which Google judges a website. For this reason it is very important that all of the images present o your website our resized to their optimum level. Otherwise the longer it takes for an image the load, the more it is going to affect its performance. When using image altering programs such as Photoshop, be sure that you save the images in their optimised version. However if you do not have access to such software do not worry. Online you will find plenty of programs which will help you in this exercise: such as:
Image Details
When adding an image in your website, it is vital that the details of the image are also edited appropriately according to the image. Such details will give a better understanding of what the image is about to search engines. When editing images through software such as Photoshop, be sure to use their functionality to fill-in this data. If this possibility is not an option, analyse a bit how such changes can be done through a schema markup.
Alt Tags
Keep in mind that search engines do not understand images, so any image properties are very important for them to read information. Alt tags are accessibility descriptions which are displayed whenever an image cannot show. The recommended length for this is no more than 125 characters. It is very important that the text is kept short and to the point, and keep in mind that keywords are king!
Keep in mind that the more optimised your content is, the better you are going to fare in search engine results. Don’t be stupid – optimise it NOW!
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