We spoke recently about beginning to focus on optimising your website for voice search. It is important to be thinking about the possible changes and additions you need to make to your website for future developments. However, you don’t want to overlook basic SEO tips and tricks that you can implement right now on your website’s images.

Google Image Searches

Images are one of the areas of websites that are often lacking when it comes to search engine optimisation. There are massive amounts of daily image searches taking place in the US. The image searches account for over 26% of all searches across multiple search platforms, second only to Google.com (59.3%). The other platforms considered in the research are:

• YouTube- 3.71%
• Yahoo -2.47%
• Bing- 2.25%
• Google Maps -2.09%
• Facebook – 0.69%
• Amazon – 1.85%
• DuckDuckGo – 0.69%
• Google News – 0.28%

Ensure you are gaining your share of these image searches by optimising all of the images on your website. Here are five SEO tips you can apply immediately.

1. Rename the file name of the image you are uploading onto your blog. Think about the search results that you would like your image to appear in. Use keywords and phrases but make sure the name of the file relates to the image and what will be found on the page if the user clicks through to take a closer look.
2. Fill in the Alt tags as they are HTML attributes. These show up when the image isn’t showing up and shows the user what the image is. The Alt tag is also used by screen readers, when the coding isn’t working and when images have been disabled.
3. Use the caption box to describe the image or the title of the image and it will show up below the image itself. Useful, especially for retailers.
4. Add descriptions in the description field to include all relevant information and even links if applicable. The description will show up when a user clicks on the image and opens it in a new window.
5. Make sure the information around the image relates to the image. Google will decide if an image is relevant to show in the search engine results page by taking the surrounding information into account. This will include the page title, the page URL, and any other images on the page, the written content and the image sitemaps.

Make sure your images are enhancing the user experience and optimise them using the tips above.  Don’t overlook such simple tasks as they do have a significant impact on SEO.