Improve Your Blog SEO With Your Images

Images are a great way to enhance your blog content, but did you know that your images can improve your blog’s SEO too?

Search engines provide image results and just like your meta description, it also scans what information is saved for your image files. Besides using a relevant image that is related to your content, things such as file name, size, and description are just as important.

Usually, when saving an image taken from a camera or uploaded from your smartphone, it will generate a filename of random characters and numbers. If you have a gorgeous photo you took of the Eiffel Town, file name “IMG_325.jpg” does not tell Google that this is an image of the Eiffel Tower. Renaming your file something relevant such as “eiffel_tower.jpg” will increase its chances of being pulled for a search result.

If you’re not aware of your image size settings on your camera, your images may be saved as a very large file. Image size will impact your blog loading time, so if search engines find these images taking too long to load, it will also not show up in search results at a decent rank. Reducing the file size will improve your image visibility in search results. ImageOptim (https://imageoptim.com/) is a great tool you can use to adjust the size of your image files for your blog.

Don't forget your image description! This is what search engines use to categorize your images.  Upload your image in to your post, then double-click the image to make additional edits. In the image edit pop-up window, you can change the description for the image. By default, the file name will appear as the description.  Here you can change this into something more descriptive.  

The description does not appear on the published blog post but it is saved within the HTML for the image:

By paying more attention to the images you add to your blog, it will be easier for search engines to index your images and share your content with others.