SEO for authors part three: optimise your images
Continuing with our series of posts on SEO for authors, this week, we’ll be talking about the images on your website and how these can impact your SEO. Believe it or not, Google can also 'read' images. So they are crucially important in telling it what your website is about.
How does Google do this? By taking a look at the 'alt text' - a short description of each image that you can add in the back end of your website. It's easy to do in Squarespace - there's a field beneath every image to add this text.
The alt text should be a short descriptive phrase that describes the image. So for example, if it was a picture of your book's cover, you would want to ensure the alt text was something like: 'Your Book Title paperback'.
Or if it was a picture of a green chair with a ginger cat sitting on it, you'd call it something like 'ginger cat sat on green chair'.
If you don't add alt text to your images, Google will read the filenames instead. So it's also really important that you RENAME images before you upload them to your website, so that they are named something descriptive (I always rename images the same as my alt text).
You should also make sure that you resize your images before you upload them, to make sure they are smaller than 500KB.
If they are too large, your website will load slowly, and Google penalises slow-loading websites, affecting their SEO.
That’s it! Simple but these considerations can make a huge difference to your SEO, so really do take the time to get them right.
You can find out more about making the most of your images in the following posts:
That’s it for this post - short and sweet! I’ll be back next week to chat to about how using links carefully can help improve your SEO.
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