Best Practices For Optimizing Site Images

Here are some best practices to follow when it comes to optimizing your website images with the proper text names and tags:

Use detailed, informative file names.

Utilizing your chosen keywords and key phrases in image file description names is a good way to boost a site’s visibility and rankings when people search for those keywords. 

For example: renaming an image 2012-Ford-Mustang-LX-Red.jpg, rather than keeping it DCMIMAGE10.jpg, if building a site for a car dealership.

Utilize descriptive, keyword-themed alt tags.

This is the #1 priority when it comes to SEO for images. In addition to utilizing descriptive file names, having descriptive alt tags (that describes exactly the content of the image) allows for greater visibility and higher rankings for a site, especially for E-commerce sites with a lot of images.

Tips/Rules when it comes to alt tags:

• Describe images in plain English, just like with file names.
• For E-commerce sites, if there are products that have model numbers or serial numbers, use those in the alt tags.
• Do not keyword stuff alt tags. For example: alt=”ford mustang muscle car buy now cheap best price on sale,” as this may make search engines think a site is spam.
• Don’t use alt tags for decorative images. This may make search engines penalize a site as well.