We have been a Gloucestershire website design company for other 10 years and now focus on website development alongside in house digital marketing/ SEO.

 

If you are considering optimising your company website in house there are several aspects that its vital you consider before taking the plunge! Contact the team here at our Gloucestershire website design company for more information or read on to discover more about vital marketing trends that have an impact online.

Images are very important to have on your website, not only for visual effects but for the optimisation aspect for search engines too. You can’t add meta data to text (unless creating a new page or post), so images are a great way to add in keywords into your website.

Use images
In order to make a page or article more appealing you should add images. They can also help users to understand your website better and social media posts look more captivating than just a bunch of text.

Find the right images
If you can, add as many pictures of your own, you won’t want a stock image of a man that doesn’t even work with you. It also needs to have a purpose with your business, finding the perfect image can be a difficult task, but it’ll be worth it.

From an SEO point of view, an image that is surrounded by related text performs better for the keywords it is optimised for.

An Alternative
If for some reason you can’t get the right picture of your own there are other ways around it. You can source images from websites that have stock photos available but there’s only one way around this, find photos that look genuine and not too ‘fake’. This is considerably easy if you spend the time looking for them.

Although most photos on these websites have prices, there’s also lots and lots of websites that have free images that you can use.

Obvious alternatives include avatars or graphs which a lot of websites use depending on your business type.

So, now you have your image it’s time for SEO to step in. There’s no point sticking the photo on your website on post without labelling it for optimisation and search engines.

File Name
Image SEO always starts with the file name, and the first place you can include a keyword, you want the search engine to know what the images is about. For example, if you picture is a yellow rose in a field your file name shouldn’t be ‘DS876H26.jpg’, it should be something like ‘yellow-rose-in-field.jpg’.

Captions
Captions are the text that accompany the image. People normally read the text when scanning an article, because it’s short, snappy and straight to the point. KissMetric even stated that “Captions under images are read on average 300% more than the body itself, so not using them correctly means missing out on an opportunity to engage a huge number of potential readers”.

Though you don’t have to add captions to every single image, this is because they don’t always fit in for the certain content. If it makes sense to add a caption to the image for users, add it, don’t just add a caption for image SEO there’s plenty of other opportunities.

Alt Text and Title Text
The alt text (or alt tags, as you might know them) are added to an image so there can be ‘descriptive’ text for the website’s visitor if the image cannot be displayed for whatever reason. In a situation when an image is not available to the visitor, the alternative text (alt text) is shown and ensures that the user can still grasp ‘the idea’ of what the image was going to show.

You should add keywords that relate to your website and the image in order to help on-site optimisation and search engines rank your website.