Optimizing Your Website Images - And Get a Bigger Bang for Your Buck
As an interior designer, your website is likely full of images – or should be. To make them even more effective, optimizing the images at your website must become a priority.
Pictures are a great way to communicate with your audience, showing them the kind of work you're capable of performing for them. And, in today’s digital world, a world where the camera in your smartphone may be of higher quality than your SLR, it has never been easier to capture and share high-quality images at your website, favorite social media platform, or anywhere else you wish to do so.
How to Optimize Images for Google
With all of that being said you may not know that, while your audience can appreciate the beautiful images you’ve posted, the search engines can’t really see them. For example, Google may know that there is an image on a web page but, if you haven’t optimized it for them, they may not be able to tell what the image represents – you have to tell them.
Remember, the search engines are machines, not people, and as machines they have limits. Without eyes to see the pictures at your website, they use other clues to figure out what types of information you're offering your visitors. For images, there is a small piece of code available, known as an “alt text” (or “alt tag”) that sits “behind” your image to identify it to the search engines.
The alt text describes what’s on the image and the function of the image on the page. So, if you have an image that’s used to show a reimagines living room, for example, the alt text might say: “reimagined living room project”. The code for this image would look something like this:
<img src="image.jpg" alt=" reimagined living room project" title="living room"/>
See how we simply inserted the image description between the words “alt” and “title”? Because of this simple step, Google no longer needs the eyes they do not have to be able to “see” the image of the gorgeous new living room you’ve designed and published for them.
It’s never too late to optimize images
Now, this doesn’t have to be intimidating at all. You do not have to be fluent in HTML coding to make this happen. In fact, if you have a WordPress website, for example, inserting this clue to the search engines is very easy, right in your publishing dashboard. If instead, you have a support person publishing content and images for you, they should be able to handle this little chore very easily.
And remember, no matter how new or old your images may be, you can always go in and optimize, or re-optimize them to tell the search engines what your visitors are seeing.
For more information and guidance, take a look at these three articles:
- How to Put Your Image ALT Tags to Work in WordPress – for easy and complicated ways to optimize your images for the search engines. (We strongly recommend the easy way!)
- Image SEO: alt tag and title tag optimization – for a clearer understanding of the why and how of image optimization, from one of the best SEO sources available.
- Image Publishing Guidelines from Google – because it’s always good to know what the search giant has to say about things.
Learning something new is always exciting, right? This is especially true when something as simple as optimizing your website images can give your interior design website a boost with the search engines, and expand your reach.
Looking for more interior design online marketing tips? Get in touch with TD Fall today.