SEO Pictures

I start where most pages fail: the audit. Using Screaming Frog's image report or Google Search Console's image discovery data, I pull every image on the page and note four things: file size, actual dimensions, filename, and alt text. On a recent [content audit](/content-audit/) of a 30-page ecommerce site, I found that 22 of 150 product images were over 1 MB, and 14 had alt text like "img_2345.png". That told me exactly where to focus.

Next, I fix filenames and alt text. Filenames should be descriptive and hyphenated: red-leather-office-chair.jpg, not IMG_5421.jpg. Alt text describes the image for accessibility and context. I keep it under 125 characters, natural, and relevant to the page's topic. For example, for a product image on a landing page about ergonomic chairs, I write "Ergonomic red leather office chair with adjustable armrests". I never use "cheap red leather office chair for sale buy now" because that harms accessibility and is ignored by Google. This all ties into proper [image SEO](/image-seo/) practices.

Then I compress and resize. Every image I upload is now sized to the maximum display dimension it will ever need. For a feature image at 800px wide, I resize to 800px, then compress with TinyPNG or Squoosh to around 80-120 KB. I also use WebP with a JPEG fallback via <picture> and srcset to serve smaller files to mobile. A worked example: five product images on a product page originally totalled 2.4 MB. After resizing to 400-600px and converting to WebP, they came in at 540 KB. Page load time dropped from 4.1 seconds to 2.9 seconds on a 4G connection. That directly supports the page's rankings.

Finally, I create an image sitemap and submit it via Search Console. This is essential if images are loaded via JavaScript or hidden behind tabs. Without a sitemap, Google may never crawl them. I also add structured data where relevant — for example, Product schema with image URLs. That increases the chance of rich results. The whole process takes an hour for a typical page but saves weeks of slow performance later.

The biggest trap is keyword-stuffing alt text. I see it all the time: "red leather office chair for sale buy now cheap office chair under 100". That fails on two counts. First, it's useless to someone using a screen reader — the description should tell them what the image shows, not what the page is selling. Second, Google treats alt text as a relevance signal, not a ranking hack. Stuffed text can trip spam filters. Write naturally: "Red leather office chair with adjustable armrests". That's 8 words, describes the image, and fits the page context. For more examples, see [alt text examples](/alt-text-examples/).

Another watch-out: generic filenames. image1.jpg, photo.png, DSC_0234.jpg tell search engines nothing. Rename before upload. It takes seconds and gives Google a clear cue about the image content. On one [on-page SEO](/on-page-seo/) project, just renaming filenames from IMG_ to descriptive names moved the page from position 12 to position 8 for a medium-competition term. Not magic, but it helps.

Don't rely on CSS to scale images. Uploading a 4000px photo and setting max-width: 300px in CSS still forces the browser to download the full 4 MB file. Your page speed suffers, and Google penalises slow pages. Always resize the image file itself to the maximum display size. A 300px thumbnail should be a 300px image file, not a 4000px one scaled down. On mobile, the difference is 4 MB vs 150 KB. That's a 1.5 second load time penalty you didn't need.

One more: ignore lazy loading for above-the-fold images. Use loading="lazy" only for images below the fold. Above-the-fold images should load immediately. Otherwise you hurt Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). And always set explicit width and height attributes to prevent cumulative layout shift (CLS). A missing height on a hero image can throw off the entire page layout while the image loads.

For years I stuffed keywords into alt text. I thought "cheap flights to London book now cheap" would help the page rank. It didn't. Rankings didn't move, and accessibility audits flagged those pages. I changed to plain descriptions like "Aerial view of London skyline at sunset" and saw no ranking drop. Actually, a few pages got slight bumps because the content became more relevant to the image's actual topic. The lesson: alt text helps context, not keyword density. I now write alt text as if I'm describing the image to someone who can't see it. That's it.

I also uploaded full-resolution photos directly from my camera — 12 MB each — and let CSS shrink them. My page speed was terrible. A travel page with 8 images loaded in 8.2 seconds. After resizing each image to 800px wide and compressing to ~100 KB, the same page loaded in 2.5 seconds. That's a 69% improvement. The rankings for "best beaches in Thailand" went from page 3 to page 1 within two months. Coincidence? Maybe, but the speed improvement alone probably triggered a position boost. I now never upload an image larger than 2000px on its longest side, and I always compress.

Another mistake: ignoring image sitemaps. I had a site that loaded images via JavaScript lightbox — Google couldn't see them. I added an image sitemap listing those image URLs, and within a month, Google Images traffic increased by about 15%. I now make an image sitemap a standard part of any site migration or [meta tags SEO](/meta-tags-seo/) audit.

Finally, I didn't use structured data for product or recipe images. That was lost opportunity. Adding Product schema with image fields means those images can appear in rich results with larger thumbnails. I fixed that, and click-through rates improved modestly. It's not a huge win, but it's free if you already have the schema in place.