How to Optimize your Website Photos for SEO

It’s important to optimize your website photos for SEO before uploading anything to your website. Renaming your photos with relevant and descriptive keywords will make your website more searchable, and compressing the image size of your photos will help your website pages load faster. All of this optimizes your performance on search engines.

Optimize your Photo File Names

Renaming your photos with relevant and descriptive keywords will help rank your image and website higher in search results. And trust me, you’ll definitely want to do this step before uploading any photos to your website.

Separate each word with a dash (-).

This helps Google more quickly separate each word from the next. Don’t use underscores (_). Google has a harder time with those!

Make sure the file name makes sense to both search engines AND humans.

Stuffing keywords can look scammy to Google, and the file name should be a true representation of what is actually happening in the photo.

Mix it up a bit!

Try to avoid using the same exact file name for all of your photos. Sure, you can save time by batch-naming several at a time, but it’s important to make sure that the description is actually relevant to the photo. I recommend making a goal to do about 5-10 photos at a time to ensure you have a variety, and well-described file names for your photos.

What are your guests actually searching Google for?

Remember when people search for your services on Google, they don’t know your business name yet, so don’t feel the need to put your business name in all of the file names. Instead, think about what future guests are actually typing into Google and use those words to describe your images.

EXAMPLES:

BAD: IMG_34560987

BETTER: sarahs-hair-salon-photoshoot-miami

BEST: miami-invisible-bead-extensions-stylist

Compress your Photos

Having optimized photo size will help your website load faster. This helps with keeping guests on your website longer AND ranking you higher in search results. We love using tools like TinyJpg.com to compress images. This optimizes the file size of the images, without compromising on the quality of the images. You still have beautiful, clear images but your website loads faster and your SEO juices are flowing. Win-win!

To learn how to add (and compress) videos for your website, check out this blog post.

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