Spoiler alert… They Don’t!
You read that right; no matter how many painstaking hours you spend carefully pouring over your visual assets and free stock images to pick the perfect photograph, no search engine will ever see it.
Does that mean you shouldn’t include images on your website or blog?
Well, we didn’t say that.
While search engines may not see the image itself, they will see the code and alt text associated with it, which still provides relevant content for the spiders to crawl over and catalog, ensuring that your content has value.
SEO AND IMAGES
If you want a refresher on how SEO works and can help your business, you contact our office to speak to an SEO expert about how search engines break down information. Still, in a nutshell, Search Engines (like Google) send digital crawlers over to your site to index it in an archive. The more relevant content you have on your site, the more accessible your site becomes to search engine users.
Relevant information includes page titles, content headings, keywords, and —drum roll please… images. In case you failed to notice, everything on that list shares a common theme except one. They are all text-based except for the pictures, which is partially true.
You see, for your image to be seen and matter to those digital web crawlers, it has to be textualized too.
AN IMAGE IS WORTH A FEW WORDS
Alt text is a term that any good SEO team will be familiar with, and to help you better understand how images help drive traffic to your site, it’s a good idea for you to know about it as well.
The term “alt text” is short for alternative text, and it’s embedded in your HTML code so the crawlers can contextualize your image. Without alt text, your image is invisible to the helpful little indexers.
When you hire GriffinWink to take care of your blogs or websites, we’ll ensure that every image has alternative text embedded in the code. This alternate text is usually just a brief description of the image with keywords that relate to your page’s content.
If you’re writing a blog on cats, your alt text for this image might say, “Cat wearing sunglasses” If you wanted to be more specific, you could include the type of cat to increase the number of essential keywords in your text. The more relevant information you have in the alt text, your SEO ranking will be better. At the same time, you don’t want to include too much. Fluff doesn’t help in this instance.
IMPORTANT THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN POSTING IMAGES
As a note, before you make your image visible to search engine spiders, there are a few things you’ll want to take into consideration.
IS YOUR IMAGE COPYRIGHT PROTECTED?
If it is, or if you don’t know, we highly recommend that you don’t use the image. Using copied material can negatively affect your SEO ranking.
FILE SIZE AND TYPE MATTERS
The faster your webpage loads, the better your SEO ranking. Making sure that your images aren’t bulky is essential to ensuring that your site doesn’t slow down the user experience.
IMAGES SHOULD BE MOBILE FRIENDLY
A large percentage of unique site visitors will see your site for the first time in the palm of their hand. Thanks to this accessibility, sites are seeing more visitors throughout the day, but this also means that your images need to scale from desktop versions to mobile-friendly sizes with ease. Images that don’t negatively affect your conversion rate.
These are just a few ways images affect your site’s user experience. Check out our blog for a complete list of best practices for using imagery on your site.
LET GRIFFINWINK TAKE CARE OF THE CONTENT
At GriffinWink, we know how important your website is for your business. We also know how hard it can be to think about everything that goes into making a great website. That’s why we offer the best web service and SEO around. If you’re looking for help getting your business noticed on the web, look no further than GriffinWink. We’re here to help.