Why it's important
Images (including gifs) and videos are important to your site's user experience: no one wants to click through to a large, unbroken wall of text.
Photos, illustrations, infographics and other graphics make your page look nice and give readers a break while consuming your content.
Quality graphics can improve your time on site and bounce rate, which are good for SEO. You can also optimize them to appear in image search results, which will open up a new traffic channel for your site.
Getting it done
Even though search engines can't see images or watch videos, they can still crawl their HTML tags. There are two places you can use this to your advantage to optimize your images:
- Filename: Use filenames like you would a URL. Use your keyword at the beginning, be descriptive and use hyphens instead of underscores as word separators.
- Alternative attribute: Also called alt text, the alt attribute lets you give a short description for users that can't load the media or can't see it. It's used by screen readers to visually impaired users as well as search engines. When writing your alt attribute, describe the subject of the image and what it's doing (if it's a candid shot). Approach it as if you're describing it to someone who can't see it - because that's just what you're doing.
In order to appear in image and video search results, your assets have to be crawled and indexed by search engines. Ensure this is happening properly by using <image> and <video> tags in your XML sitemap. If you've got a lot of images/videos, create a sitemap index file for your site.
External resources
- Google Image best practices
- Your Guide to Optimizing Images for SEO
- How to Use Alternative Text for SEO