8 Image SEO tips for your Website you Need to Know
Before starting my NJ Personal Brand Photography business, I had no idea what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was. I’d done the hard part, I’d created a clear brand, unique content and a beautiful website, but how was my website going to get seen by potential customers?
Are you like me when I started out? SEO means what? And optimize how? Well here are my really easy to follow tips to go from having just a beautiful website that nobody sees, to your potential clients searching on Google and finding you. You don’t have to be a tech whizz to properly optimize your images, and benefit from a valuable SEO asset.
Image optimization benefits:
– Faster page loading times
– Better user experience
– Boosts websites’ SEO ranking
1. Create Unique Content
It can be tempting to create your website with images you found on Google, but you really need professional images to tell your brand’s authentic story and stand out! Making a good first impression to your audience is key in converting your audience into paying clients. No better way to do this than with unique professional images that make up your core content for your website. And getting that library of images is best done working with a photographer who shoots NJ Personal Brand Photography. Don’t be like those cheesy generic stock photo websites! The more original and higher quality your images are on your website, the better the user experience and so they are more likely to appear on relevant searches. And don’t forget to use keywords on each page of your website so that you appear in Google search results when users search for those keywords! A great resource for SEO can be found here!
2. Save to the Right Format
JPEG what? PNG who? Understanding all the various image formats can be a minefield, but if you keep your image options simple before adding to your site, you can’t fail. Although there are many image formats to choose from, the most common web file types are JPEG and PNG. PNG is a larger file size but produces better quality images, while JPEG you may lose image quality, but you can adjust the quality to find a good balance between size vs quality.
3. Compress Your Images
Ever clicked on a website, and only waited 20 seconds before clicking off if it doesn’t load quick enough? Your customers will do exactly the same. That’s why I highly recommend compressing your images before uploading to your site. You can do this in Photoshop or you can use a tool like TinyPNG. There’s nothing better than a beautiful website that loads quickly, and is more likely to keep your audience on board.
4. Customize Image File Names
Typically, file names will look like “IMG_100019” straight out of the camera, but this doesn’t help Google. Image file names alert Google as to the subject matter of the image and so it is really important to use descriptive, keyword-rich file names. It might seem a little time consuming to begin with if you have a big backlog of images on your site, but changing the default image name is always a good idea. Let’s take my website for example: I could name a file simply “photography” but if, like me, you are selling photographic services on your website, potentially every image can be named “photography-1,” “photograph-2,” etc. By using a more descriptive name, such as “NJ-personal-brand-photography” it lets users and search engines understand the image and improve my SEO value. Even better… make the name of the image match the keyword for the webpage you are posting the images on!
7. Give Your Page a Unique Title & Description
Think of your image as needing a good back story: by giving your page a unique title and description, it all goes to help your image search algorithm. All of your basic on-page information such as copy text, meta data, page titles, etc affects the way Google ranks your images. So the better the story that we can give our images; the better the result when using search engines.
8. Make Your Images Mobile-Friendly
It’s great if your website looks beautiful on a laptop or big screen, but most customers will be looking at your website on their phone. There’s nothing worse than your website not looking right on a mobile, and so customers are put off and you loose user engagement. In order to create a beautiful looking website on your phone, you need to create responsive images. This means the images on your site will adjust to the size of the device, whether that’s on a laptop or a mobile.
Hopefully this helps you feel more confident when you come to upload images on your website. And if you are looking for NJ personal brand photography for your website or NJ headshot photographer, I would absolutely love to work with you so hit me up here!
