How to name images for SEO? Best Practices & Examples

We all agree that stunning images are important in convincing your audience and converting leads into repeat buyers.

However, if you name them right, they can also serve as an SEO tool to boost your organic traffic.

How you name your images is just as important as the content they accompany.

Google’s 2017 survey of 16,000 adults showed that 90% of consumers are more likely to patronise a business whose photos pop up in search results. Besides, images can take up to 36% of screen space in mobile Google results.

Another study by Moz also showed that images rightly named can increase your website’s SEO performance by 10%.

It’s a win-win for you.

In this article, we will walk you through how to name images for SEO to drive traffic to your website and outrank your competitors.

Alt tag, title tag, file name, captions? What’s the difference?

What is an alt tag? What is a title tag? File name? Captions? What’s the difference between these terms? Although they seem interchangeable, each plays a distinct role in optimising your website images for SEO.

In short:

An alt tag, also called alternative text, is a text description that helps search engine crawlers determine what your page is about.

A title tag mostly offers additional information and only appears when a user hovers over the image.

A file name is the descriptive name of the image on your computer, but it significantly impacts your SEO if you use a focus keyword.

Captions are texts that provide context to the image, and they mostly appear beneath or beside it.

That said, below are some guidelines on how to name images for SEO.

Correct file names (src=)

Let’s say you run an online store selling handcrafted jewellery and fashion accessories for ladies and you want to upload an image of a beautiful, handcrafted gold necklace. Usually, your computer will save the image in this order “IMG_28376.jpg”, but this is a generic file name that gives search engine crawlers no hint about the image.

As such, they can’t index it for your keyword and it won’t appear in search results. So, you will miss out on the traffic from potential customers searching for “handcrafted gold necklace”. But if you upload the image as “handcrafted-gold-necklace.jpg”, search engine crawlers will use this textual cue to index the image, which gives it a higher chance of appearing in search results of people looking for handcrafted necklaces.

This small tweak can translate into more traffic, increased engagement and more sales.

Alt tag aka alternative text (alt=)

Alt tags, also called alternative text, serve dual purposes. First, they help visually impaired users who rely on screen readers to understand your image. Second, they provide context to search engine crawlers.

Imagine you manage a digital marketing blog and you are working on an article about best practices for social media marketing. You design an infographic that summarises all you said in the article. But the infographic bears no name or at best, you name it “infographic”. That image has missed the chance to show up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and made it inaccessible to screen readers.

Instead, using an alt text like “infographic showing best 5 practices for social media marketing” will improve your SEO and accessibility. Remember that an alt text should always be kept short and be an expression of the image.

Image title tag (title=)

A title tag offers additional information about your image and ONLY appears when a user hovers over the image. It serves as a fallback when an image can’t load and provides a smooth user experience for those with vision disabilities.

Alt tag vs title tag?

Even though they seem similar and are equally important in optimising your images for SEO, they aren’t the same. An alt tag captures the essence of the image in few words while a title tag can be longer and more descriptive, providing more context for the image.

For example, if your alt text is “infographic showing 5 best practices for social media marketing”, your title tag can be “detailed infographic showing the 5 best practices for social media marketing include short-form videos, targeted ads, influencer marketing and attention-grabbing hooks.”

Captions

Captions are powerful for drawing visitors in and making them spend more time on your website. They can also boost your SEO if they contain focus keywords your audience would search for. They are usually beneath or beside the image.

For instance, a caption for an alt text that says “infographic showing 5 best practices for social media marketing” could be “Explore the 5 best practices for marketing your business on social media, from targeted ads to influencer marketing for increased brand awareness, high engagement, more sales and thought leadership.”

This is the caption: A screenshot of how to add a caption to an image in the Sanity backend.

Image title attributes in WordPress

If you use WordPress as your content management system (CMS), you can use the image title attributes. Title attributes allow you to provide more information about your images and can be directly added to the images in the media library. This WordPress feature is particularly useful for website owners or SEO managers who manage large content libraries or multiple sites. Ensure you tweak the title attributes to contain your focus keyword.

Use of keywords

When it comes to best practices on how to name images for SEO, the use of keywords can’t be overemphasized. Keywords are at the core of SEO. Using the right keywords in your alt tag, title tag, file name, captions and image attributes positions your images to show up in SERPs and increase your website traffic.

Ensure you conduct proper research to get the relevant but high-volume keywords you want your content to rank for. However, avoid keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the art of saturating the textual cues for your images with keywords such that they feel unnatural and abnormally distributed. Search engine crawlers know when you force keywords and can penalize you by deranking your website or removing it from its index.

You can also use keyword mapping to identify the best keywords for your website sections and different but high-volume variations of your keywords to optimize your images. This not only ensures that each image is uniquely optimized but also prevents keyword stuffing.

As you might have noticed in the previous images in this blog article, we did not use the same keyword in the caption, title tag, file name, and alt tag. If we did, we feel like we are keyword stuffing. We could have, but we chose not to. We did use similar keywords, or phrases that come close to the keyword. We did this to diversify and maybe also rank for related keywords.

Google Image Search

Google Image Search, which was introduced in 2001, is a feature that allows you to search for images on Google. If your images are well-optimized for SEO, they will appear in SERPs when users search for images related to your website content. This is an additional path for more people to discover what you do and become a customer.

To stand a chance for Google Image Search, use high-quality images. Ensure your alt tags, title tags, file names, captions, etc. are keyword-focused and descriptive.

How the image search results looked today (for us) when googling "how to name images for seo"

Other Best SEO Practices for Images

While we’ve covered the fundamentals of how to name your images for SEO, there are additional strategies you can use to gain a competitive edge in your niche. Let’s check out some of these additional strategies.

Relevant images

First of all, make sure your images are relevant to your article. Both search engine crawlers and visitors pay more attention to images directly related to the content. Your images should provide more context to the content and enhance your readers’ understanding. For instance, your content shouldn’t be about homemade pizza while the image shows a piece of jewellery.

According to Jeff Bullas, an AI thought leader and marketing blogger with 20+ years of experience, content with relevant images enjoys 94% increased engagement than content without images.

Relevant images increase the perceived value of your website. It is a marketing technique that increases your website's reputation and establishes it as a thought leader in your industry.

Unique images vs Stock images

While stock images are a more convenient solution, unique images are always better. Stock images are generic and don’t particularly hold any marketing appeal. They are accessible to almost everyone and relying on them makes your brand no different from the competitors.

On the other hand, unique images elevate your brand’s distinctive identity, showing your users that you care about them enough to provide tailored content. A study by Venngage showed that marketers found that original visuals performed more than stock photos.

Let’s say you manage a restaurant. Imagine how authentic and engaging your content would be if you showcased original pictures of the making of your dishes, staff in action, kitchen arrangement, etc. instead of using generic stock images that have likely been used by hundreds of other businesses. The unique images would make your marketing more compelling, resulting in higher conversions.

Responsive images

According to Statista, mobile devices account for 58.67% of global website traffic. Also, Google has shifted to mobile-first indexing, which means websites that can adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions are considered first in search engine results. As such, you must optimize your images for mobile devices. Make sure the images adjust size when looked at on a mobile phone. Users should be able to see the most important elements of your image at fast loading times on their screens.

Dimensions

Another important strategy for naming your images for SEO is using the right image dimensions. When choosing your image dimensions, consider choosing one that allows you to balance image quality and load speed.

Large dimensions usually have high resolutions but take longer to render, which might cause users to abandon your website. Small dimensions have lower resolutions, making the image appear distorted and discouraging your visitors from exploring your website further.

You can use tools such as Adobe PhotoShop, TinyPNG, ShortPixel, etc. to resize your images while maintaining quality and faster load times.

File size

Like dimensions, file size also affects your website’s load speed. Large file sizes slow down the load speed, increasing bounce rates and ultimately reducing your search engine rankings. Research shows that over 50% of mobile users leave a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. To prevent this, reduce the file size of your images while maintaining the quality.

File type

The file type can affect both the file size and quality of your images. The common file types are JPEG, PNG, WebP and GIF, but each serves different purposes. JPEG can compress large files without reducing quality, making it ideal for photos. PNG is best suited for images that require transparency or have fewer details.

GIF is ideal for simple animations, while WebP is an emerging, more advanced file type that offers superior compression and quality for website use. Research shows that WebP images make websites lightweight, and improve page load speed, user experience and search rankings.

However, each type also has its drawbacks. For instance, resizing PNGs, JPEGs and GIFs can lead to the original pixels stretching to fill the extra space, thereby creating a distorted or blurry image. On the other hand, WebP images aren’t supported by all image editors and browsers. The key is to know the right file type to use depending on the task at hand.

Image sitemaps

An image sitemap is an XML file that provides search engine crawlers with the details of the images on your website, making it easier for them to index your content. It is a not-so-obvious, powerful SEO strategy that can drive more organic traffic to your website through image search results, especially considering that image queries account for 27.3% of search queries.

When creating image sitemaps, ensure they contain not only the image URL but metadata such as the title, alt text, captions, title tags, subject matter, license information, etc. Also, regularly update the sitemaps to ensure search engine crawlers have the latest information about your images.

Add structured data

Structured data, also known as schema markup, is additional information that gives context and meaning to your images. This additional information is also what search engines display as snippets alongside your images in search results. According to Search Engine Land, images with rich snippets have 30% higher click-through-rates than those without. Research by Ahrefs also showed that 99.58% of featured pages that have snippets rank in the top 10 of Google Search, showing a correlation between high rankings in search results and rich snippets.

Final thoughts on SEO for images and a Holistic approach

Optimizing your images for SEO might seem inconsequential, but if done correctly, it can change your SEO game.

Now that we’ve guided you through the best practices on how to name your images for SEO, the next step is to implement these practices and watch your website maintain a top ranking in SERPs.

However, you won’t get overnight results, so you have to be consistent and patient. Also, it can be challenging to optimize every image for SEO, especially if you manage multiple websites or have large content libraries.

Operation Nation is here to help. Our services include a done-for-you, personalized guide on how to name images for SEO, optimize every aspect of your content strategy and convert your leads into sales. Start by booking your slot for the SEO consult here.