Your Guide to Optimizing Images for SEO

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Images are a vital part of creating quality, engaging content online. People have short attention spans and no one wants to open a page only to find an unbroken wall of text staring back at them. Photos, infographics, illustrations and other images are a key way to supplement your text to make your page look attractive and consumable. In fact, here at WooRank, we have a two image minimum policy for our blog (for posts about things other than company and product news). And, as an added bonus, images have the potential to bring in more traffic through image search results.

However, to make this happen you need to optimize your images for search engines as well as human users. Lucky for you, we’ve created this guide to using images in a way that will complement the rest of your on page SEO.

How to Choose Your Image

Image Relevance

Making your pages engaging and easy to read is a major part of user experience, which can have a noticeable impact on your SEO; bad UX leads to high bounce rates, which is a ranking signal used by search engines. So choosing the right image for your page can be almost as important as how you optimize it for SEO.

Choose your article and blog images strategically so they:

• Have the same subjects or topics as your articles,
• Emphasize the point you are making,
• Enhance the reading/viewing experience instead of disrupting it.

It’s also important for you to place images on your page that are relevant to the text around it. Along with file name, alt attributes and image titles (which we’ll cover a little bit later), search engines use the page content surrounding images to determine what the image is showing. It’s an important signal used to determine relevance to a keyword used when searching Google or Bing image search.

Avoid using stock photos. They make your page look generic and unengaging, or give it the feel of a marketing brochure. Plus, it’s pretty difficult to find one you can use without paying a lot of money. If you want to use images, make them yourself, or get a photographer and/or illustrator.

Free Images

Use your own images whenever possible. This will help you use images that are the most relevant to your content, and it will also help you avoid the potentially thorny issue of copyright. However, if you can’t reliably create your own quality images, there are some tools and services out there that will help you find images:

1. Canva: Canva is an extremely helpful tool you can use to create designs for your content. They have a library of stock images, vectors and illustrations you can use to make custom graphics. There are also filters and other features you can use to edit your own images.
2. Freepik: Freepik is an image search engine that crawls hundreds of free image sites and returns results most relevant to your search term. It’s a great resource for free vectors, photos, illustrations, PSDs, icons and almost any other design feature you could need.
3. Google Images: Google’s free image search engine, Google Images, has a huge selection of images. However, it returns results regardless of copyright status. To avoid usage issues, select "Labeled for reuse in Usage rights under Search tools:

1. Flickr: Flickr is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, image hosting and sharing sites. Many Flickr users share their work under the Creative Commons license, which has multiple versions that allow for reuse with certain restrictions:

• Attribute License: This license allows you to reuse an image (or an edited version, known as a derivative) as long as you give the original owner, in this case the Flickr user who posted it, credit.
• No Derivative License: This is similar to the Attribute License except you can’t create derivatives. That means you can post the original version as long as you give proper attribution.
• Noncommercial-No Derivative License: You can use the original images only for noncommercial purposes. This license does not support the use of edited versions of the image.
• Noncommercial License: Or, attribute noncommercial license. You can use these images for noncommercial purposes only, as long as you give property credit.
• Share Alike License: This means that the images licensed through Creative Commons are covered by a different, original copyright. These licenses can include attribution and noncommercial aspects as well.
• Public Domain Dedication: These works are completely in the public domain. You are free the use these images without restriction.
• Public Domain Work: This is slightly different from the Public Domain Dedication license. These images have lost their copyright, due to it expiring or lapsing, or they are not eligible for copyright protection.

File Names

After you’ve found, or created, the right image, optimization begins with choosing the right filename. They provide a benefit to your page’s SEO, and are critical for ranking in image search results. Just like when you’re creating a URL, use your target keyword and use it at the beginning. Never use the default image file name, like "DSC00087.jpg" unless it’s absolutely unavoidable. Many content management systems use the file name to create the image title, so this will pay off for you even more later. Some other file name best practices to follow for SEO are:

• Use hyphens (-) as word separators. Don’t use underscores ( _ ) between words. Search engines use hyphens as markers between words, but they don’t recognize underscores at all. That means they’ll see "image_file_name.jpg" the same as if you used “imagefilename.jpg”. This is important because, obviously, human searchers will use spaces when using Google. It also means that Google will be able to better determine the topic of an image and how it relates to a keyword.
• Be descriptive and accurate. Try to include as much detail as you can. If Google can’t find suitable page content, it will use the image’s filename as the page’s search snippet for image search results. If you’re writing a blog post about cars, include the make, model, year and color.
• As usual, make sure you’re using your keywords naturally. Trying to use too many keywords, or keywords that aren’t related to the rest of the page content, will look like spam and could hurt your SEO.

Title and Alternative Attributes

Image titles and alternative attributes (commonly called alt attributes, alt tags or alt text) are attributes that go in the image tag. In an image tag, they look like this:

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