Photos on a website help us to understand the website much more easily. No wonder, it is said that an image speaks more than a thousand words. However, it is surprising that bloggers didn’t think of images as more useful than adorning the site. And so, images had no place within SEO tools and strategies.
However, the fact is, a little more time and effort on photos can convert them to cultivator from candy. And when you do it successfully, you will be pleasantly surprised to see the growth in your traffic. Here are four basic tips for doing that.
1. Change the File Name
Any standard digital camera allows a numeric name to every photo taken by you. So, you will come across photo names like 10259.jpg which tells literally nothing about the image, what it contains, or how it should be used.
If you insert that image in your site without changing this daunting file name, you will encounter the image publishing instructions by Google. Therefore developers particularly ask bloggers to change the photo file names before they insert those photos in the blogs.
The computer program of Google is quite robust, but as soon as it doesn’t understand an image and what it contains (though this may change soon) it looks at the surrounding text to find out what the image is really about and why it may have a value. Google examines the data of which the file name is a part and if the other important data is absent, that filename may be considered as a snippet of the image in search results.
2. Don’t Leave the Alt Text Field Empty
When you plan to post an image on your blog, you get a dialogue box with a set of fields that you are supposed to fill. If you skip them, you can miss some benefits. One of the most important among these is the “alt text” field.
As per Google’s clarifications, the data in the alt text field is closely observed by the algorithm. It is used to determine the nature of the content. This means that you have to fill this field so that Google’s spider can find you.
Apart from this, the alt text field has a deeper purpose. The text is shown as a replacement for the pictures when users are unable to access them. People with a visual disability as well as users having slow internet connections may get these texts in place of images.
However, you have to keep in mind that alt texts should not be full of irrelevant keywords. They should just be natural and describe the image accurately. SEO Tools.