Hello and welcome, in this video session I'm going to show you how to name your images for seo purposes.
Now let's take a quick look at this slide here, and understand why you should name images properly, first, because major search engines
like Google provides image search, second, your potential customers conduct image search, and also naming your images properly will help
search engines to gain overall understanding of your websites overall content. And also, once you understand the importance of
naming your images properly, you will as a result attract more people to your website. Make no mistake about it.
Therefore, let me show you, what an image element looks like on a web page, this is a source code of my web page. And as you can see, an
image tag starts from here and ends here. And it contains the source, meaning where is the file located. Also we can define the width and height
and also alt attribute and also title of the image. Now let's quickly browse and find out why these are important.
Now image element is used for incorporating inline graphics. What that means is, you want to have an image
on your web page, therefore, it needs to be included in an image element or else the browser will not understand the markup language.
Therefore, I want you to imagine a blind citizen for example, ok it will make sense to you in a minute. You see, when you place your images on
your web pages. The way I go about it is, I first imagine a blind citizen going online and browsing the internet just like you and me,
right, but you see a blind citizen is restricted as to understanding web pages, if the web pages are not designed with accessibility matters
and so on. Now when I imagine as to how should I name my images? What I do first is I imagine a blind citizen I'm imagining him or her visiting my
web page. And what I want to do first is name my images properly.
Ok in this example I've got melbourne_city.jpg as an image name, ok, now by itself it doesn't say much to the visitor, right?
You see, when we start playing around and naming our images properly, the alt attribute is used for alternate text what that means is,
let's say we got an image with its source and file name as such you see on the screen now.
When we then place an alt attribute, ok? It's very important to understand that, alt attribute is not a place so we can place our keywords in it, ok?
We shouldn't be thinking like that, ok? What alt attribute must do is you know describe in short and descriptive terms as to what that image
is all about, ok? What is the contents of that image? Just imagine the blind citizen visiting us now right. How can we allow that human to
understand by looking at the alt attribute as to what that particular image is all about, ok? Now it is very important because I
find that a lot of SEO information online suggests that you know search engine optimisation should include alt tags while we keyword stuff,
you know keyword spam the alt tags, ok? That's not what you do, ok? That's negative if we keyword spam the alt attribute, ok?
It has to describe further extend the file name, that's what it needs to do. So let's take a look at the title attribute,
although it is nonessential element so to speak, ok? But we need to think a little bit outside the box so to speak when we think of
Google rankings and so on. What that means is, let's look at the slide as an example. Now just picture this in your mind, look at the
information that I have here on this slide. Now without the alt attribute and title attribute, by looking at the file name, you probably couldn't tell
what that image was all about or what it was describing, ok? But because we've placed the alt attribute further expanding the file name,
and then we placed the title attribute, and if we look at the whole image element as one. Then you can by looking at this example,
you can actually visualize what that image is all about, ok? Now, surely this is an example but I want to explain to you in a sense that
this is how you expand your file names, and this is how you expand your alt attributes, and this is how you place your title attributes,
in a sense, surely you're not going to be targeting search terms as to people catching trains and so on, right?
But, let's say, let's say that I own a business in the city of Melbourne, ok? Let's say for an example now there is many websites and online
business who own online websites they try to bring locally targeted potential customers and so to speak right?
So they will inevitably have images if they are located in Melbourne, surely perhaps will have images about Melbourne, but, you see?
When we start thinking like this, what is going on here is, you see if I'm targeting the keyword Melbourne for example, or Melbourne Australia.
Well as far as Google SEO is concerned, this is good enough for me, ok? This is good enough as opposed to having things like this in my alt
attribute, ok? Perhaps you know reason may say well this is pretty good, but I assure you that it isn't, this is actually much better for seo
purposes, so just remember that because that will it help you get better understanding as to how to search engine optimize your images
on your web pages. What I'll do is I'll show you how I went about this particular image, and how I went about targeting
some keywords within the alt attribute and also the title, ok? You see? This is what keywords here all of them are important but, these ones are
important but you see I don't have to name the image as search engine optimisation dot jpeg and alt attribute as to search engine optimisation and
then title search engine optimisation, and if I do that that's not smart. But when I go along this line here, along these lines here,
I'm indirectly targeting that particular keyword that you see here, ok? So this is how you do it, instead of just you know putting all the
keywords in alt attributes or title attributes and so on, ok? It's very important. Now if we look at this slide now and when we start thinking about
Google rankings and so on or better user experience and so on, ok? We can also place the width and height attributes in the image element
itself. Why is that important? It is very important because when the internet browser loads, if we define the height and width,
it will create a placeholder so to speak, while all your other web content is being loaded. When we define the width and height your
web pages will load faster, and not only that, your design elements, such as your Div's and your other content on the web page
while browser is rendering it won't look funny or your code won't break, your styles won't break and so on, ok? So just keep that in mind as well.
And if you want to find more in depth explanation of how to name your images for seo, I've made a blog post located at www.rankya.com
and simply head out and read through it. I thank you once again. This video session has been brought to you by www.rankya.com.au take care
thank you very much for your visit. Thank you bye bye