I often get asked how to optimise personal branding photos for google and honestly it can seem like a bit of nightmare. In fact SEO in general is a bit of a minefield but this is all going to help!

And it’s well worth doing.

There are just 3 things you need to do…

Descriptive name

Give your image a descriptive name, google starts by looking at what type of images are on your website. They will be JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, WebP, or SVG (though I’d generally stick with jpeg or png or gif).

When you receive your images from your photographer they’ll more than likely be named in a sequence either straight out of the camera, so 638A72.jpeg or maryanne16.jpeg and this just doesn’t help google at all.

It wants to know what’s in the photo. Now you don’t have to make this a long description…a simple business-women-tips.jpeg will do.

This is important to do because if there’s no other relevant text, Google will use this file name in the search results as the snippet. 

After you’ve named the file correctly, it’s time to add a description in the Alt Text of the photo. 

alt-text

This is a slightly more technical point but it’s made so much easier if you’re using a wordpress website.

Because google can’t ‘see’ images it relies on text to describe what it is. You do this by adding in alt text, which is the text that describes an image.

But there’s definitely a knack to this…

In WordPress you can go to media (where all your images are stored) and select an image and on the right hand side you will see a section called “alternative Text”.

The worst thing you could do is stuff images with keywords that are repeated over and over again.

For example, “Business woman sitting entrepreneur with laptop girl boss working on computer iMac ” You get the idea. Google will find out and your site will suffer for it. 

You also don’t want to use too few words!  

Just putting the word “woman” isn’t helpful. The perfect alt text description is a short sentence that gives you a good visual for what’s happening in the image, such as, “Woman sat at desk with notepad.”

Reduce the size

When you get your photos back from your photographer they’re going to be huge, beautiful high resolution images. But they’re going to be far too big for your website.

Not only do huge photos cause problems with download times for your website…but google doesn’t like them either.

So make them smaller. Or better still. Ask your photographer to give you the images in high res and web sized!

A web sized photo should be less than 500 kilobytes (a high res one is about 4/5 megabytes in comparison).

Hope this has helped and gives you an easy way to make your branding photos SEO ready!

UPDATED – Ive just started using this brilliant free plugin for wordpress called SMUSH that reduces the size of your images without losing any of the clarity!

PS ———> If you’re thinking about having some updated photos, take a look at my next BRANDING DAY in July!