SEO Step By Step Guide–20. Dealing with Images

Often the names of the images you find in websites surprise us. It shows how careless people are regarding website design basics. It is not just a flaw on website design basics, but it also fails to tap the potential of the images for enhancing one’s SEO efforts. It is not difficult to spot images that are named as image1, image2, etc. No one will be penalized for naming their images in the above fashion however, it is not part of the industry’s best practices.

It always pays to name our images in a descriptive way. When we want to work with those images again in future to make a few tweaks or replace them completely, we can easily track those images. How does proper naming of images help our SEO? Images give you yet another chance to include your keyword in a strategic position of the website. Often the header of the page is an image and the left most corner will be the logo of the company. By placing keywords in such strategic places we can improve our page’s relevancy to a search that is made. So incorporate your keywords in the image names.

In most websites, the header of the page will be uniform in all the pages so we will be calling the same image in all the pages. In such cases, the name we have used in one page may not suit the other page. There will be an obvious keyword mismatch. Though it is not part of best design practice, you can save the image under multiple names and call appropriate image on each page. For the online user it will be the same image but for the search engines, the keyword will keep changing with each page in a way that matches with the content of the page. This will of course not be the best thing to do when you have limited hosting space. Therefore, you must take into consideration your hosting space as well. 

When you have a large website and many images on each page, then it is best to create sub-folders within the images folder and categorize images as per the nature of the images. When you are creating subfolders, use your keywords for folder names as well.

If your keywords made of more than one word or in other words, if they are key phrases instead of keywords, then you can hyphens or underscores to separate words.

When you are into optimizing the image names, make sure that you do it in a systematic way. You should be able to handle your images with ease when you want to make any changes to your website. Your SEO efforts should not make things difficult for the web designer. It is best if the optimization suggestions are passed on to the web design team so that your SEO team need not rework on tweaking your website for better search engine performance.

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