Small- and medium-sized businesses are often tempted to relegate their search engine optimization (SEO) analyses to the free reports offered by online platforms like WordPress and Google Analytics. Unfortunately, those reports rarely provide the details you need to make improvements. One of the things they tend to glaze over is image optimization.

Do images really affect my SEO?

One of the reasons images tend to be overlooked when auditing SEO is because it’s easy to forget just how many images your website has. Maybe you only had a few photos on your homepage when you first built your site. Over time however, you probably added countless visual elements to blog posts, landing pages, and team photos — drastically increasing the influence of your images on your SEO.

Image resolution and load speed

The first thing to check is how your images affect your site’s speed. If you’re using ultra high-resolution photos, those with mobile devices or satellite data connections will have trouble loading your site. Site load times affect your site’s ranking on Google, so make sure to pair your images down to a more reasonable resolution and save them as web-friendly file types.

• Choose the JPEG format for illustrations or big photos since it provides clarity and good colors in a smaller file size.
• Select the PNG format to preserve background transparency.
• Use the SVG format for icons and logos. Combine this with Javascript or CSS to resize SVG images without losing quality.

Keywords and image title

The days of keyword-stuffing are long gone, but that doesn’t mean you can get away with uploading images with filenames like “DSC2558.jpg”. Before doing so, make sure the names of your images are relevant to their content, such as “gym-trainer-helping-lift.jpg” or “call-center-customer-service.jpg”. This makes it easier for search engines to derive information from the images on a page.

“Alt text” and title text

Even though Google is getting better at recognizing image content without any help from text identifiers, describing your images in your website’s back-end is still important for SEO. Every image on your site should have enough text-based information without disrupting the user experience.
To see how this works in WordPress, open your site dashboard and click on Media. This will display all the images, videos, and audio there. Click on any photo and you’ll have access to text editing tools. Whatever you include in the Caption field will be shown below the image, so check that it corresponds with your content. If not, skip it. In this case, user experience takes priority over SEO.

The Alternative Text and Description fields will be visible to visitors only if the image doesn’t load or if they select it manually. They may not seem that important, but these should be considered non-negotiable for SEO purposes.

Check that your site is doing all these things before requesting another SEO report. If your score changes, audit your image optimizations regularly. If you’re still seeing red, there are a number of web- and cloud-based platforms that can help improve your content. Give us a call today to find out more!

The post Optimizing website images for SEO appeared first on TechSolutions, Inc..

For businesses of any size, getting on the first page of Google search results is important to drive traffic to the website. Although most search engine optimizers will focus more on getting organic results, the limitation of this approach is that it only reaches users looking for a particular service and not your specific brand. For those looking for tips on how to advertise services as well as brand identity, we have a few tricks.

One of the ways you can improve your branded search visibility is by ensuring your brand name is mentioned multiple times throughout your site. Make sure to link the brand name to the homepage of your website, include the brand name in descriptions of the company, and add meta descriptions to the site.

Because Google’s site indexing service is completely automated, just about anyone should be listed in the results. The goal isn’t getting listed, it’s getting listed first. Little things like placing your sitemap in an easy-to-find location, including descriptive titles, and always filling out meta descriptions to increase the chances of your brand links appearing on the search pages.

Social media may technically be a different story, but it works hand-in-hand in today’s search engine optimization efforts. These pages are very likely to be listed when customers are making ‘brand’ searches. Make sure you maintain profiles at every “big” social media site, and add as much information as you can concerning your brand identity. Because the ultimate goal is to drive traffic to your site, link to your website in every field that allows it.

Lastly, Google business reviews are more important in getting branded search results than most people realize. Claim your business on Google My Business and frequently encourage your top customers to leave positive reviews concerning your brand. The more positive reviews your website has, the higher your site will appear in the rankings.

SEO is important for business, but so is creating a brand identity. An intersection of these goals may seem difficult, but not impossible. For more information on SEO, branded search results and anything related to your Google search rankings, get in touch with us today.

The post Customizing search results for your brand appeared first on TechSolutions, Inc..