Blog photo’s impact your blog alot more than you think, it isn’t just about taking a pretty eye catching photo. There are certain things you need to do before and after you upload it to your blog to help boost your SEO/DA Score. Every blog photo you take and use on your blog impacts your blogs SEO (Search Engine Optimization). For those of you who don’t know what SEO is or what it does to your blog, it is basically where your blog gets ranked in the search engine eg. Google. These are simple steps you should be doing before you press publish on a blog post.
I did a blog post earlier this year with Six Easy Steps To Improve Your Blogs SEO Score, there are many things that impact your SEO which you can find out in that post. When I first started blogging I would take my blog photo’s and upload them to my posts without thinking or realising what else I could to do to them and no I don’t mean editing. I only do basic edits to my photos i.e. adjust the brightness and warmth that is all I do.
So what could you do to maximize your blog photo’s?
#1 The Basics – Take The Photo
Blog photo’s are what your readers see first so of course make them appealing to look at. Doing this won’t necessarily improve your SEO but it will help bring more readers to your blog. Make sure they are bright and clear.
#2 Naming The Photo
Once you have edited your photo and you click the save button make sure to name your photo. Most people will keep the photo named what it already was e.g. img123 but for your SEO you should rename the photo. If the photo is a picture of a certain makeup product name it what the product is. If it is a post that isn’t a review e.g. Travel Makeup Guide, name it Travel Makeup Guide. The idea is to name the picture what people will type into Google or any other search engine.
#3. Optimizing The Image
Once you have edited your photo and before you upload it to your blog you need to optimize the image. This basically makes the file size smaller so it loads quickly on your blog. Don’t you hate it when you go onto a blog and the images take forever to load? Well optimizing your images stops this. It doesn’t take away the quality of your image it just resizes the file. I use Image Optimizer which is free to use.
#4 Title Text & Alt Text
Once you upload your photo onto your blog you will then need to add the Title Text and Alt Text.
What Is Title Text?
You need to put in this box what you actually see in the picture. Above I have taken a screenshot from how I did my Ombre hair at home but that isn’t what you put in the Title Text. As you can see I have put “Ombre Hair Before and After” as that is what you can see in the photo. If it is product review but the name of the product or if it is a recipe post of a pasta dish put “Cheesy Pasta Bake” or so on.
Remember to keep the Title Text simple.
What Is Alt Text?
Alt Text is what tells Google what your image is. When you type into a search engine “Makeup Geek Eye Shadow Swatches” the search engine will search the Alt Text on images. You know when your computer plays up and doesn’t show you an image but it will show you text? Well that is Alt Text, so if your blog ever has a glitch and doesn’t show the image it will show what you put in the alt text section.
In the above photo you can see I have put more than one bit of text in the Alt Text section, just put a comma at the end of each one to seperate them. It helps if you use the keywords you are using in the blog post aswel in the alt text. It helps link everything together.
How To Add Them:
Blogger | To add both of these on Blogger all you have to do is upload your image as normal to your blog post, once in the blog post right click the photo and click “properties”.
WordPress | To add both of these on WordPress just upload the image as normal then all you have to do is click on the image and click the edit image icon.
That is it! They are such easy steps to take but they are steps alot of people don’t know about or forget to do. I make sure to do these on every image I upload to my blog.