How to Optimize Images for SEO on Blog Posts
Why You Need to Optimize Images for SEO
If you aren’t taking the time to optimize images for SEO before posting a blog, you are doing yourself and your business a HUGE disservice. It will largely impact how your blog or web page ranks and how easily it can be found. In some cases it can even impact how the rest of your site is found as well. How fast your page loads can play a large role in SEO and images that aren’t optimized can slow down your load speeds.
It takes a little extra time, but it is really super simple. Fully optimizing images for SEO involves your file size, file name, alt text, and metadata.
File Sizes
how I optimize images
You want each file to be as small as possible, if it takes up more than a GB you def need to make that ish smaller. A couple hundred KB to several MBs is great for each image.
There are loads of ways to go about optimizing image file size. Many may in fact be easier, faster, or more professional than they way that I do it and that’s just how it is. I won’t go into the various ways of optimizing images, but I will tell you how I do it.
It is important when optimizing an image’s file size that you keep the quality of the photo while making the file as small as possible. The larger the file size = longer load time = lower SEO score + people leaving your site because they are tired of waiting.
I like to use iloveimg.com’s compress option. I have tried out loads of different settings and and methods for shrinking file sizes (that doesn’t leave me with a pixel-y photo that looks like its from my 2010 Vivitar digital camera and edited in pic-time). Starting with a high quality, high res, large file image, I upload it to iloveimg and then re-download them from the site. The compress option is great in this case because it shrinks the file according to each image, resizing the file to a size that keeps the image’s quality but makes it as small as possible. Resizing the image to a certain amount of px per the longest side can work, but doesn’t take into account the difference in the amount of info in each image. Meaning one image may start to get pixel-y at that size while another could still be smaller without a visible difference in quality.
That is essentially a long winded way of saying: I think the compress function is the most efficient option.
So to do that: upload files in bulk (or just one) to iloveimg.com/compress > click “Compress Images” > after loading, click “Download Images” if it hasn’t automatically downloaded > unzip the files and you did it!
File Names
This one is easy points and is often overlooked. Use your keyword in the name of your file. It’s easy and only takes a few seconds when you use a bulk renaming method.
bulk renaming
You can rename all of the images that you are including in a blog post at one time when they are in the same folder. That looks like this:
Mac: highlight all images, control-click > “Rename…” > type new file name > “Rename”
My settings look like this:
An article on bulk renaming with Windows
Alt Text
I will always scream about alt text from the rooftops. Alt text is an accessibility function that tells the internet what your image is. It is text that describes your image for people who are vision impaired, what will display if your image can not load, and how Google and other search engine read your image.
Google can’t see what your image is, so you have to tell it!
alt text on wordpress
WordPress associates alt text with your image, so the easiest way to edit this is from your media library! Describe your image and try to include a keyword when it is relevant. Here is how to navigate there:
Media > Library > click on image > type your text in the alternative text box (the first editable box on the right side of your photo)
alt text on squarespace
Adding alt text in Squarespace is simple! When you add an image or to your post, double click on it and type your alt text under “Image Alt Text”. If you are using a gallery format, you will need to first click into the gallery, then double click on the photo to navigate to the alt text field. Easy peasy.
Metadata
I don’t really consider metadata to be a critical step of the image optimization process, but it will give you extra points (not that it really works like a simple point system). Metadata does describe a larger group of information about your file, but when I refer to it I am really talking about the description associated with an image.
You can read this article for more info on metadata.
If you have the extra time or are already writing metadata for your images, include a keyword in the text used to describe your image. Simple.
I end up skipping this step more often than not because it takes kind of a long time when you have a lot of images and alt text is basically the same thing, but within the website rather than the image file.
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