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.