SEO tips for your website

​My name is Krystine Monnett, and I own a digital marketing consulting company in Columbus, called Holistic Marketing LLC. We work with small-to-medium-sized businesses, helping them to streamline their digital efforts and create a unified marketing strategy. 

Prior to launching my business, in 2017, I worked at a digital marketing agency in town and then moved on to The Limited and helped them to develop their SEO department. Those experiences helped me to realize that there is a need within small businesses for digital marketing services, and this is often overlooked. 

There is no doubt that captivating photography and product imagery can enhance your brand exposure and engagement with your customers, but there are a couple of things that you should consider once your have your final image files prior to adding those beautiful pics to your site to ensure you are maximizing their impact.


Compress Your Images

When your images are delivered to you they are likely going to be full-size. This is great because it allows you to use them how you see fit, however prior to using them on your website, you will want to compress them.

Compressing an image ensures that the file size is as small as possible without sacrificing the quality of the image. Depending on what kind of platform your site is on, there may be some built in tools or plugins that you can use to accomplish this. If not, here are some free online tools that can help you:

https://imagecompressor.com/
https://tinypng.com/
https://compressjpeg.com/

To the naked eye, you will not be able to tell that the image is different. To search engines and user-experience, it means that your site will not be bogged down by large files and it won’t sacrifice site load times.


Name Your Images

Once you have downloaded your new compressed image, you will want to give it a descriptive, yet short file name. File names and another feature called alt tags help search engines to understand what your image is. Search engines currently cannot see images as we do, so we need to provide them with the context necessary to index and rank them accordingly.

​Take the picture above, a bad image file name would be IMG_367.jpg, instead National-Kitten-Day-Kitten.jpg would be more appropriate and useful. 

Now, on to alt tags, like image file names, alt tags help search engines understand what the image is. Alt tags should be concise and use natural language.

A good example of an alt tag for the above photo would be “Kitten on floor for national kitten day”. Your website platform will determine where you need to add this alt tag, but in HTML, which is not visible to website viewers, it would look like this:

<img src=”https://yoursite.com/National-Kitten-Day-Kitten.jpg” alt=”Kitten on floor for national kitten day”/>


Support the Image

Now that your image is compressed and optimized, you need to support it. The content on the page that this picture is featured on should be relevant to what the picture is. Search engines use context clues to not only understand images, but to rank pages for relevant keywords. 

So if you added the picture to a page about engineering, then it would not make sense for search engines to rank that page highly for National Kitten Day. If the content on the page was about the history of National Kitten Day and the celebrations through the years, it would be appropriate for that page to rank well when individuals are searching terms related to National Kitten Day. 

Search engines use multiple site components to determine which pages are most relevant to respective keywords, this creates a better user-experience when it comes to finding exactly what you are looking for when you Google it.

By following the suggestions laid out, this will help your site rank better for relevant keywords in both traditional and image searches, and it will ensure your wonderful images are not slowing your site down. To learn more about SEO considerations for your website, reach out to us at https://www.holisticmarketingllc.com/