Something that aspiring and professional SEOs alike often neglect to do is optimize their images and focus on proper image seo.  So many people neglect it, in fact, that there is next to no competition most of the time for your images.  People either forget to do it, have never thought about it, or don’t see the value in it.  In all honesty, most of the keywords I target are unlikely to get image searches, but I would never turn down free visitors for a minute or two of work. The best part is that the process is very simple.

There are only three aspects to concern ourselves with when optimizing our images and they are the image file name, title, and alt text.

1)  Image File Name

This is the easiest part of image SEO to overlook.  I have personally tested this myself and it certainly makes a difference in how your image ranks in the image SERPs.  Take a look at some image results right now and you’ll find that the top results usually have the keyword in their file name.  When naming your images put hyphens in-between your words so that they are recognized as separate words instead of one.

2)  Title Tag

Same deal here.  Simply put your desired keyword as the title for your image (you can use spaces instead of hyphens).

3)  Alt text

This part gets a little more complicated.  The purpose of alt text is to tell internet users that are visually impaired or others that use text-based browsers what an image is about.  The alt text essentially replaces the image and so it should accurately describe what the image is.  Many people just use the alt text to stuff keywords – I usually don’t see these images at the top of the image SERPs…  What I do is try to use my keyword AND describe the image.  I already have the title and file name to target my keyword, I don’t need to abuse the alt text.  Often times my images are diagrams or something of that sort so my alt text is simply “keyword diagram” which effectively accomplishes both goals here.

Doing these three things takes very little time and makes for prime image seo, so I don’t see why anyone would neglect to do them.  I don’t backlink to my images – this is all I do for my image optimization.  Just by doing these three things a lot of my images end up being the #1 in the image SERPs for my keyword.

Bonus Image SEO Tip:

Having your images show up at the top of the results isn’t enough – you need people to click-through to your site too.  A simple trick I use to get my images to stand out is to take a quick look at the current results.  Often times, there will be repeats and a lot of very similar images.  Choose an image that isn’t already in the results and that will stand out.  Are there a lot of black-and-white images?  A boldly colored image is an easy choice then.

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