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There are a lot of people out there telling you to use images in your blog – we’ve done it right here –  but there aren’t many people telling you how?

At this point, you might be thinking: what else is there to it? And certainly, it does appear to be a case of finding a relevant image, getting the right licence, and plonking it on your site. But you’re probably hurting your SEO ranking if that’s all you do with your imagery.

So we’re going to go through some key steps you need to take to ensure the images on your blog are well-optimised for better SEO performance.

File size matters

Images come in a wide variety of sizes, and it’s often tempting to use the most high-resolution image you can get your hands on. But in the digital space, this is bad practice.

Whenever a user loads a page on your site, they have to download all the contents of the page. In most cases, this won’t use up much bandwidth because text and most other elements of a webpage are light.

The heaviest element of any page is usually the images. And if you’ve got a full resolution image on your blog, that could easily be in excess of 50MB. That’s 50MB you’re draining from your users’ internet. This is bad practice for the user experience (UX) and can lower your SEO performance as Google rewards sites with good user experience. So image optimisation is crucial if you want to rank higher on search engines.

Here are some tips to help you optimise your image file size:

• Download the size of the image your need rather than just going for the highest possible resolution. Something close to 1920×1080 is good as that’s the most common screen resolution although you should be aware that screen resolutions are creeping up again in recent years.
• Compressing your images is a must. You can do this yourself in Adobe Photoshop although other image editing software will be able to compress images too. There’s no hard-and-fast rule on how far to compress your images. Use your eye to judge how far you want to compress. If it’s too grainy, scale it back a bit.
• Aim for a file size of 200kb. But going even smaller would be even better. Sometimes it can be tricky because busy images tend to be bigger in file size. It’s about striking a balance between having a fast site that will load your images quickly, while ensuring they still look good.

You can find out more about how to change your file size here. We also summarised some options for you if you’re looking for a cheaper alternative to Photoshop.

If you’re using WordPress, there are some plugins that can help you do all of this. Just remember to keep the number of plugins you use to a minimum.

WordPress plug-ins for optimising your images

Make it easy for Google to know what your image is about

When Google, or any other search engine, crawls your site, it will read the text on your site to understand the content. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do that with images and is therefore reliant on the file name and alt text to work out what the image is about.

So it’s important that your file names are clear and descriptive. Does the image show a bridge? Then the file name should have the name of the bridge and even the location.

Take this image. The file name should describe the image so we would include words like “mountain biking”, “trail” and “forest”. We also know it’s in Whistler, British Columbia so it could be worth adding these details too. The file name I’ve gone for is: male-friends-mountain-biking-in-whistler-forest.

Note the formatting of the file name. Dashes should be used in place of spaces as that’s how Google knows when a word begins and ends. Furthermore, everything is in lower case which is simply best practice for file names.

Alt text is even more important than the file name

The alt text is used to increase accessibility for those with visual impairments but also so that people know what they’re meant to see even if the image doesn’t load. It also helps search engines work out what the image is about.

So the alt text is a good opportunity to include extra details that you couldn’t fit into your file name. Be careful not to make it too long. Something around ten words is plenty as long as you’re pithy. Just remember to include important details that help readers understand the content if the image can’t be loaded.

Did you know you can also use alt text as anchor text if you want to use the image as a link?

Here’s the alt text I would include for the image: Male friends mountain biking on foggy, atmospheric Whistler trail in Canada.

There’s no need to add alt text for decorative images as they’re not providing any additional information.

REMEMBER! The image file name and alt text isn’t an opportunity for keyword stuffing as this can create bad UX and can therefore lower your SEO ranking. Your goal is simply to make it easier for search engines to understand your content so that they can serve up the right images to the right people.

Image placement is important

People always say to use relevant imagery, but that advice never felt that useful. After all, who would spend money buying an image that’s irrelevant? What’s more important to note is that your images should be placed around content that speaks to the image.

Text and imagery are not separate elements of your content. They should complement each other and work together to form something more compelling. This is why we often use images to help convey a message we’re trying to communicate in words.

So when using an image, there should be some text around it that directly relates to it. This is vital because Google uses the surrounding content to determine what an image is about.

This isn’t necessary if you’re using images for decorative purposes.

Test your images

We use images in our content because we want to entice and engage our readers. That means the choice of image is important. So why not optimise them by experimenting with different options to see what works best.

This is especially worth doing with your header or feature image because it’s often used as the thumbnail image when you share your blog on social. That means the choice of header image affects how likely someone will click to read your blog in the first place.

Remember to keep all other variables the same when doing this. You can measure your average weekly views to see if changing the image has made a difference. Or if you want to measure clickthroughs from a social channel for comparison, use the same publish date, time and message.

File types

Choosing the right file type for your blog is easy. Use JPGs for all images unless you need transparency features, in which case use PNGs. If it’s animated, use GIFs. That’s it!

It can’t be stressed enough how important these steps are to improve the SEO performance of your blog. They’re quite quick and easy once you’ve found a workflow that suits you and you’ll reap the rewards for implementing techniques that others might have overlooked. After all, why pay for images if you’re not going to make the most of them.