When you understand the basics of good SEO, it’s really quite simple. You are structuring your website data — that is your copy and images — in such a way that gives priority to certain phrases. It lets search engines know what information is important on a page.

If you search Google Images using the phrase “black doctors,” you’ll get a lot of images of black doctors.” Now, if you do the same search using the phrase “white doctors,” you’ll get a lot of images of… you guessed it — black doctors. And it’s actually not a glitch. Google is performing exactly as it should be. The reason why you get a lot of non-white doctors end up in results when you search Google Images for the term “white doctors” is actually simple to explain. Most people, when keywording, naming, and writing the alt tags for their images, don’t describe the colour of the person’s skin unless they are non-white. So, we end up with a lot of images such as “black doctor on white background” in the search results.

As someone who has designed and built dozens of websites in his life, I realized years ago that when you’re designing a website you have to think about function first, and then form. The function of your website is to inform people, but before people get to it, they need to find it. And unless they’re coming directly to your website either by someone typing the address into the address bar or from a link on an external website, they are likely landing on your website as a result of an organic search in a search engine like Google or Bing.

1. Use Keyword Phrases to Name Your Images

One of the best ways to improve the SEO of your images and the pages on which those images reside is to name your images based on the search terms you want to rank for on that page. There are two things to consider when naming the images that appear on each webpage. The first is the placement of the image on the page — higher up on the page is given more importance; lower on the page is given less importance. The first image on every page should be named using the keyword phrase you are targeting for that page.

So, if you have a page specifically for “Grimsby Newborn Photography,” then you would want to name your image:

grimsby-newborn-photography.jpg

The other images on that Grimsby Newborn Photography page you would want to name similarly, but not the same. Use variations, such as:

newborn-photographer-grimsby.jpg
grimsby-newborn-photographer.jpg
newborn-photography-grimsby-ontario.jpg
grimsby-photography-newborn-baby.jpg

It’s also a good idea to establish and use a file naming schema that you adhere to when inputting and outputting your images into your raw image processor. I set up my file naming structure years ago so that I could easily find session images on my computer using the search function.

Using naming presets in Capture One, or Lightroom, on import the files are named with the following structure, in the following order:

Year Month Day Hour Minute Second
City Province/State Country
Shoot Type
Job Name (Subject, Company, Event, Couple)
“photo-by”
Photographer/Brand Name

Examples:

20200923184423-Hamilton-Ontario-Canada-wedding-photography-Ewan-Felicity-photo-by-Blackwood-Studios.jpg
20200923184423-Belfast-Northern-Ireland-United-Kingdom-actor-headshot-nonbinary-Aoife-McKinlay-photo-by-Kevin-Patrick-Robbins-KPR.jpg
20200923184423-Sydney-Australia-commercial-photography-food-photo-by-KPR.jpg

I do this on import for a few reasons: in case I forget to do it on export, in case the clients see the images in a few years and has forgotten my name or the name of my business, and so that each image has a unique timestamp in the name that allows me to see exactly when it was taken just by looking at the file name. Sorting by file name is instantly also sorting by date and time.

SIDENOTE: I’m a big Capture One user and fan. I don’t think there’s another raw processor that can even touch it. I even process my weddings in Capture One. But the one thing I miss about Lightroom is the ability to name images on export based on keywords. When I used Lightroom, I had import presets based on the type of shoot and I would preload common keywords into the metadata. Then I would use those keywords in the file name schema on export. I can’t do that in Capture One.

2. Write Great Descriptions for Every Image’s ALT Tag

When you’re building and updating your website, writing blog posts, or updating your portfolios, hopefully you’re being intentional about the keyword phrases you’re using on your page’s data structure, such as the page title, the url slug, and section headers. One thing we overlook far too often, though, is writing excellent descriptions of every photo we upload to our website, as well. When we do, it’s often because that photo isn’t accompanied by a caption or cutline, and when it is, we often don’t do a good enough job of being descriptive.

This is one place where we have to remind ourselves that our clients are probably not going to notice some descriptive text and might even skim right on by it, but search engines crawling our website will not only read it, it’ll affect the authority they assign to our website. The one thing you do NOT want to do, however, is to just stuff it with keywords. Write proper descriptive sentences for each photo. Maybe two to three sentences. Err on the side of too much information.

Here are some examples:

In WordPress, each image has a form field where you can add ALT text. In Squarespace, and other content management systems, the text created for the caption is automatically converted and used as the ALT text. One of the things I like about Squarespace is that if there is no caption text provided, it uses the image name as the ALT text, so the ALT text is never blank, and because my image names all contain the date, location, type of photo, subject and my brand, I know if I forget to write ALT text for an image, Squarespace defaults to my image name of relevant keywords.

This is why writing great descriptive captions for each photo on your photography website is important. It improves the SEO for that image, that specific page, and the entire website, all of which contribute to greater authority which leads to higher results rankings.

3. Optimize for Speed

I’ll keep this short and easy: use JPEGmini. It’s awesome. It shrinks images without sacrificing quality. And it’s inexpensive. Go to JPEGmini.com right now and get it. You won’t regret it. Get the Pro version and use the plugins for Lightroom and Capture One and adjust your output recipes and export presets to pass through JPEGmini and you’ll never have to think about it again.

I’ll include a video in the show notes of a highly experienced printer using a loupe to try to tell the difference between two large prints and struggling to see a difference.

One thing I did when I got JPEGmini is I opened it up and just dropped all my image folders onto the program window, went to bed, and woke up with about 100 gigabytes of reclaimed space on my hard drives. It’s amazing. It’s a no brainer. Go get it.

Homework

So, those are three ways you can improve your SEO by focusing on your images. I’m going to give you some homework today.

1. Put all your images through JPEGmini and reupload them. Your site will load faster, which is great for mobile, which is great SEO value.

2. Rename your images. I want you to check the file names of the images on the main pages of your website. Don’t worry about all your blog images right now, just focus on the images on your main section information pages. Change the image name of the top image on each page to the keyword phrase you are targeting for that page, separating each word with a hyphen, and then do the same for the rest of the images on those pages using variations of the keyword phrase you are targetting. If you have an image carousel on your page, consider the first image in the carousel the top-most image.

OPTIONAL: If you really want an SEO boost, take the time to write great descriptions for each image and add it to the ALT tag. On Squarespace, remember the ALT tag text is the same as the caption text, so just add it to the caption and hide the caption.