SEO: Do Images Require Optimisation?

For a long time, it was okay to neglect the images on your website and still rank without using alt text and image title names to boost your page relevance. However, on-page SEO is more important than ever now, so excluding images will prevent your website’s SEO from being the best it can be. 

Search engines cannot see images on websites, so it is important to give the image an alt text and relevant title name to ensure Google knows what the image is about. By not creating this text, you lose a huge opportunity to be as visible as possible online.

It helps Google if the text on the page where the image is located mentions the image, too, so always try to reference your images in your text, close to where it lives on the page, using keywords similar to the alt text/title name of the image. Google also recommends providing descriptive titles and captions for your images, so consider adding those when relevant.

The image types Google can index include BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG, so be sure to only use these image title types on your website to make it possible for Google to index them.

Name your image title something that is indicative of what the image is itself, rather than something like IMG2394870.jpg. Yes, keywords matter here!

Extracted by Stanley Mak from our e-Book, “18 SEO Myths You Should Leave Behind in 2017.”

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