Your photos have a direct impact on SEO.
As photographers, images form a very focal part of our websites (or at least they should).
We are all aware of the importance of text and key words in our sites with regards to Search Engine Optimisation.
There is a whole world of SEO that can and should be applied to our images too.
The processes of optimising your images for SEO starts with naming the images and ends with key-wording them appropriately.
Matt Cutts explicitly states that dashes are better than underscores when naming an image on a website.
It’s really important to name your images correctly and accurately for SEO reasons.
Whilst browsing a lot of wedding photography sites I see so many images titled “IMG6723.JPG” for example.
For Google, and by inference, for the people searching in google, you will do yourself a huge favour by naming your images accurately. When a bride is looking for a potential wedding photographer she is not going to search Google for “IMG6723.JPG” – she is going to search for “Wedding Photographer near Portsmouth”.
So, next time you are uploading a load of images from your last wedding to your public facing blog (this isn’t so important for Proofing sites), consider the names of the images.
Lightroom and Aperture etc. allow very easy batch renaming of images.
You should try and be descriptive in your image name, but don’t over do the keywords. Try to keep the words down to around five or six.
For example: “Lansdowne-Road-Wedding-Photography.jpg”
Always keep in mind what your clients will be searching for. More and more people are Google Savvy and will use the Google Image search to help them find the results they are after.
When it comes to placing the HTML into the site, the ALT Tags and the TITLE tags are very important and you should not ignore them.
An example of a well formed image HTML portion is:
<img src=”Lansdowne-Road-Wedding-Photography.jpg” alt=”Wedding Photography” title=”Wedding Photography at Lansdowne Road Portsmouth” />
The ALT tag is an alternative source of information for the image. This is what will be displayed in browsers with images disabled. It should simply describe what the image is about.
The TITLE tag should provide some additional information. It should be relevant, short and concise.
Google officially confirmed that it concentrates on ALT text when trying to figure out what images are about.
Additional Notes:
Flash: If you have a Flash based website you will have great difficulty in using your images to aid SEO.
Whilst Google can index text in Flash applications now (though only ones built correctly), it cannot understand image ALT and TITLE tags parsed through a Flash file.
EXIF Data: At present, it is my understanding that Google does NOT index EXIF data in images. I’m fairly sure this will change at some point so if you include EXIF data in your web-ready images, it may be good practice to start key-wording accurately to future-proof your images.
-km (listening to: Alone & Forsaken; Hank Williams)
Hi Kevin
this was something i knew about from before and something i have found which helps loads is a plugin for wordpress called Nextgen Gallery it allows you to set the tags and image names after uploading and can do it very easilly.
Keith
@Keith Adams – Nextgen is great. I use it a lot. “SEO Friendly Images” is another very useful WP plugin.
Thanks for this Kevin.
I use the ALT tag regularly but didn’t realise that the name of the image could also make a difference.
Michelle
I’m putting together my flash/html/blog based website now. Front page is a link to either html or flash version with option to go to the blog. I actually quite like the blog I’m going to use…..in fact as time has passed I’ve really come to appreciate how much more powerful a blog is to the normal site….and I’m half thinking…make the blog the landing page…..and have the site as a link off it….quandry, quandry..
So anyway, my current (not live) landing page (of three links and lovely pics) is html. What I load into my flash website (via CMS) is reflected in my html page. So effectively, if I named the images correctly, google, at worst, would pick up the names from my html version of the site right?
@Anurag – yes, you are correct. Google (at worst) will pick the names up from your HTML site. The main issue you will have if your landing page is light on HTML keywords is that Google will not return to index very often (as it won’t see the home page changing very often). I’d be inclined to look at using your blog as your main site. My research with my brides indicates that most of them (>70%) decided to contact me on the strenght of the blog images and stories, rather than the galleries etc that are on the main site. As the blog will change more often, Google will return more often too.
-km
Holla Kev
Quick one if i have 20 images all named the same with the same alt will google look negativly on this for example
with 20 different images
Hi Keith – I’m not sure if Google will look at it negatively as such, but it would definately be better to have unique alt tags. I think it’s almost impossible to have every image with a unique ALT tag so I wouldn’t sweat too much over it.
-km
cheers kev
thanks for sharing….
Thanks for the info Kevin – most of my images do not have keywords as the file name.
Cheers
Mark.
Hi Kevin. Thank you so much for the SEO course yesterday – it really opened my eyes to what needs to be done. Tagging my images correctly is the first thing on my list.
Great tips. Thank you for that