Beginner’s Guide To Optimizing Images For Your Blog

A good blog post consists of more than just good quality writing. It also needs to be visually attractive to your reader, so that it immediately grabs their attention and then continues to hold it long enough for them to read the whole article and perhaps stay on your site and browse other articles and pages too.

However, it’s not as easy as whacking any old image in your blog post and hoping for the best. Because images are more powerful than you may realise. And if you know how to use them correctly, they can massively influence the success of your blog posts.

To help you out, I’ve put together my beginner’s guide to optimizing images for your blog, so let’s explore this topic in more detail.

The Importance Of Having Images On Your Blog

Let’s face it, blogs without images are boring, right? Unless you’re someone like a university scholar looking to read educational papers and you’re only really interested in the hard and fast facts of an article, it’s unlikely you’ll be happy reading a blog post that contains pages and pages of scrollable words.

Images on blog posts keeps visitors to your blog interested. They help to add visual appeal, and they break up big blocks of text making it much easier to read the content.

They can also sometimes help to get a point across better or explain things in a slightly easier way. For example, if you are sharing a crochet tutorial, it is beneficial to have images alongside the written explanation, to help show the different steps of the project, as well as the tools needed, and the final outcome.

Including images in your blog posts also offers various ways to improve the SEO of your site, which I will go more into in a moment. And it also offers a way to connect with your readers, to enforce your brand, and to share on your social media pages.

The long and short of it is, images in your blog posts are a must. But how do you go about optimizing images for your blog in the best possible way?

How Optimizing Images For Your Blog Will Help It Rank Better

There are a few simple things you can do when you add images to your blog posts that will only take you a few minutes but will help your blog to perform and rank better over time. Here are some ways to go about optimizing images for your blog:

1. Make Sure Your Images Aren’t Too Big

There are two main issues with using images that are too big in your blog posts. Firstly, big images mean slower loading times, and this will not only affect the SEO of your site but will also put your readers off. We are becoming increasingly more impatient as a society, and when we search for information online, we expect things to appear immediately. If it doesn’t, it’s likely you’ll lose readers. And when you lose a reader, they are unlikely to return.

Secondly, large images in your blog posts can detract from the writing and will make your website look messy and unstructured. This can also be off putting to your readers. When a reader lands on your site, we want them to have as enjoyable an experience as possible. We need to make it visually appealing to them, easy to use and navigate, whilst also making sure the information they are looking for is clear and accessible.

Different people will give you different answers about what size images you should be using in your blog posts. It can also depend on what blog platform you use, whether you prefer to use portrait or landscape images, as well as the type of image file you use. Just be aware that photos you take on your phone or with a camera will be too large, so you will need to resize them. I use a free image resize site called PicResize to resize my blog images and I always keep them to a size of 600px wide by 400px.

2. Get The Writing To Image Ratio Right

How many images you include in a blog post is entirely up to you. Some blog posts lend themselves to more images, for example a step by step tutorial based post or recipe post. Whereas others don’t really need lots of images for you to get your point across. However, what we do have to bear in mind is user experience and this is just as an important factor as optimizing images for your blog.

If a reader is faced with pages and pages of written content that isn’t broken up by images it is harder to keep their attention. I would always recommend having a header image (the main image of your blog post) as well as images within the blog post itself.

In general, I aim to include an image after every couple of paragraphs or for every 500 words. This is just enough for an image to peek above the fold (the content you see on a screen before needing to scroll). It helps to break up lengthy text, keep the reader’s interest, and aid understanding.

3. Add Links To Your Images

Images aren’t just there to visually improve the look of your blog post. If you are optimizing images for your blog, you can improve the SEO of your site. You see, images contain more than just a picture, they also have data and code behind them, which search engines look at when determining how to rank your site.

One very useful element you can add to your blog post images is a link. This could be an internal link (a link to another post or page on your own blog) or an outbound link to another website. There are benefits to be had from both of these links.

• Internal link – Directs readers to other areas on your site, which keeps them engaged, and more likely to convert into a customer.
• Outbound link – Helps with EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). Not a ranking factor per se, but it is used by Google to assess the quality of your content and will go towards helping the online visibility of your site.

4. Fill Out The Alt Text On Your Image

As well as links hiding behind your images, there’s some other useful information stored there too, one of which is the alt text.

Alt text (alternative text) is a written description of the image. So, for example a good alt text for the image below would be something like ‘brunette woman wearing open light denim shirt over white a t-shirt, holds pen to her mouth in her right hand and is looking down thoughtfully at a notebook on a desk. There is an open laptop in front of her on the desk and some dried flowers.’

The main purpose of alt text is to assist to visually impaired readers. Screen readers pick up the alt text and use it to read aloud a description of the image. Therefore, the more information you include in the alt text, the more useful it is. This creates a better and more accessible user experience for all of your blog visitors.

But the biggest reason you should be using alt text for optimizing images on your blog posts, is that when search engines such as Google, crawl web pages, they are unable to identify an image file unless it has alt text. Therefore, alt text is a ranking factor and an SEO practice you should most definitely be implementing if you want people to find your blog online more easily.

5. Use Keywords In The File Name Of The Image

When you download an image, whether it’s one you have taken yourself or one you are using from a free resource, do you give much thought to what you save it as? If not, you should. Because the file name you save an image under is just as important as adding a link and alt text.

That file name is something that Google and other search engines use to influence the ranking of your website. So, if you keep the file name that is automatically assigned to it when you download it, you are absolutely missing a trick!

The file name of your main blog image (the header image) should ideally be the title of your blog post, as this then accurately describes what your article is about. Images used inside your blog post need to also reflect the subject matter and should feature some good quality keywords related to your post.

Hopefully you’ll have already done some keyword research before even writing your post (I’ll talk more on that in a future blog post), but if you haven’t and the whole concept of keywords is new to you, just make sure you use words that you would associate with the topic you have written about. For example, if you’ve written a blog post about Christmas dinner on a budget, you could save your internal images with file names such as ‘frugal festive feast’, or ‘feeding the family for less at Christmas’ etc.

These keywords act as little markers to search engines that your content is relevant, good quality, informative, useful, and trustworthy. By adding them to your images as well, it is another marker to make your blog stand out. The more markers like this you have, the better.

6. Check You Have The Right Copyright Permission Of The Image

When you’re optimizing images for your blog, one thing you need to think about is where your images have come from. If you’re using images of your own i.e. ones you have taken on a phone or camera yourself, you own those images. However, if you are using an image that someone else has taken, you need to make sure you have permission to use that image.

One thing I’m going to make crystal clear is that you can’t just Google search an image, find one you like, download it to your computer and then add it into a blog post. It is not your image to use and if you do use it, it is highly likely you’ll be found out and issued with a copyright infringement fine, which is usually in the hundreds of pounds. Imagine if you’d done the same on all your blog posts – it is a costly mistake to make!

There are plenty of image sites out there that offer libraries of images that you can download that are either royalty free or have the relevant permissions. Some of these sites you have to pay for, for example Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, and iStock, and some of them are free, like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay.

The paid sites will generally offer a larger selection of images, however if you get good at knowing what terms to search for, the free image sites are a great resource, and I use them all the time. Just be sure to check the small print of each image to make sure you are ok to use them and to see whether you need to include attribution or not.

I think it’s also worth me mentioning, that if you use your own images, you should think about adding a watermark to them so that it makes it much harder for other people to steal and reuse your images. You can do this really easily on the free version of Canva and it really helps to reinforce your brand.

Final Thoughts

Optimizing images for your blog posts is not as difficult as it first sounds. Every single one of these tips that I have shared with you take mere minutes to implement. And if you start to do them whenever you put a blog post together from now on, it won’t be long before it simply becomes a part of the blog writing process.

If you have any questions about using images in your blog posts and the best ways to optimize them to improve the SEO and appearance of your site, please get in touch.