Images are a great way to improve the user experience on your website. If you have an e-commerce website, images are needed to show your customers exactly what you are offering.
One thing I always tell my clients is, search engines can only read, they cannot see. That being said, it is extremely beneficial for you to optimize all of your images so your website can rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPS).
When you download an image on your computer, sometimes the names on those images are not very descriptive. For example, when you are downloading an image from an iPhone the name on those images are typically the date and time the photo was taken (Photo Jun 20, 11 36 41 AM).
In order to improve this image for search engines, it is necessary to change the name of this image to something a little more appropriate. In this case, the image is of the Cortney Leggings by Dream Leggings. So we renamed the image file “Cortney Long Regular Leggings by Dream Leggings.”
This image description is used by search engines to show the appropriate images when someone is searching for them. You do not want a someone else’s products showing up when they are searching for your products specifically.
It is always a great practice to go ahead and rename images as soon as your download them. A great description for the image will help search engines find your image and will make it easier when you are giving your images ALT text.
Alternative text (ALT Text) is a phrase that can be inserted as an attribute in an HTML document to tell website viewers the nature or content of an image. The alternative text serves the same purpose and conveys the same essential information as the image.
In the case of the Cortney Leggings by Dream Leggings, it would be necessary to describe the leggings in detail. Looking at the image we can describe the image as: The Cortney Leggings by Dream Leggings featuring a southwestern design in yellow, orange, green, pink, and black.
The alt description is necessary because your customers or potential customers may not know the exact name of your product. If they were to describe your product in a search, the likelihood of them finding your product is a lot higher if you have a proper description on your webpage and your image’s alt text.
Not only does filling in the ALT tag help your websites SEO, but it helps with your site’s accessibility. Blind users who use screen readers cannot “see” what your images are and rely on the description in the alt tag to figure out what the image is.
Search engines use multiple factors to determine how to rank on their search results. Most of the times, these factors are related to the content on a webpage (text, URLs, headers and titles) or the authenticity of the website itself (domain age, number and quality of outbound links). A new factor that has come into play over the last few years is website speed!
Back in the days of dial-up internet, some of us may remember waiting ages for a webpage to load. Today, we expect webpages to load instantaneously. Users typically do not have the attention span to wait on your website to load. They want it in front of them as quickly as possible. One factor in getting your webpage to load faster is images. When you have large image files on your webpage that are not compressed, it takes time to load them. In order to speed up your webpage, you need to compress your images.
Here are some FREE online tools for you to use for compressing your images:
Compressing PNG Files:
Compressing JPEG/JPG Files:
Compressing GIF or SVG Files:
Ryan Bailes