Image SEO Checklist

Optimize your images

First of all, your image should be an inherent part of a page and share the same theme: the page’s title, headings, body text must tell visitors the same story that the image tells.

Create an Images folder on your server to save all your pictures there.

Make sure search engine crawlers are allowed to index it.

Use descriptive keywords in your image files’ names - separate words in the file.

Names with a hyphen, not an underscore.

Provide a small description of an image in the alt attribute of the img tag, but do not fill the alt attribute with tons of keywords, even if they are relevant.

Think of also using a short image title with keywords in them.

Place the keyword-rich text in the body around the image that describes it.

If the image constitutes a link, its anchor text is quite powerful in terms of optimization for high image-search rankings.

On the other hand, if you have other pages of your site linking to the page with important images, create keyword-rich link anchor texts to such pages with images.

Use high resolution images, if available.

Provide different resolutions of images.

Avoid putting a 'click to see larger image' link inside of a JavaScript link.

Scripts may cause difficulties in the link indexing.

Check how your image looks in thumbnail size.

Stronger contrast is needed to better discern an image, which might lead to more people clicking on and linking to the image.

Save photos as JPG files, and other graphic image types as GIF.

Search engines tend to interpret a GIF image as a standard graphic image with 256 colors, while JPGs as photos with millions of colors.

Re-upload your pictures from time to time, since image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and might affect relevancy.

As promotional tactics, you may watermark your images with your site address — if they are linked to, people on other sites will learn about yours.