Image SEO: Alt Text, File Names, and Speed
Images are the most neglected corner of most websites' SEO. They get uploaded straight from a phone, named something like IMG_4832.jpg, weigh five megabytes, and carry no description. Each image like that is a small tax on your rankings, and most sites are paying it dozens of times over.
The fixes are simple enough to become habits. Here's what actually matters.
Alt text: describe, don't stuff
Alt text is the short description attached to an image, read aloud by screen readers and read closely by search engines. Good alt text plainly describes what's in the picture: "technician replacing a water heater in a basement utility room." That helps visually impaired visitors, helps Google understand the page, and makes you eligible for image search traffic. What doesn't help is keyword stuffing: "water heater repair best water heater company cheap water heater" reads as spam to Google and gibberish to a human using a screen reader. Write one honest sentence per meaningful image, and leave alt text empty only for purely decorative graphics.
File names and context
Before uploading, rename files descriptively with hyphens: kitchen-remodel-maple-cabinets.jpg instead of IMG_4832.jpg. It's a small relevance signal, but it costs three seconds and it compounds across hundreds of images. Placement matters too: an image near relevant text inherits context from it, so put project photos in the sections that discuss those projects, with captions where they'd genuinely help a reader.
Speed: the part that moves rankings most
Oversized images are the number one cause of slow small-business websites, and page speed affects rankings directly. Three rules cover most of it: resize images to the dimensions they'll actually display instead of uploading 4000-pixel originals, compress them before or during upload, and use modern formats like WebP, which most platforms now convert to automatically. Enable lazy loading so images below the fold load only when needed. Shaving a few seconds off load time often does more for rankings than any content tweak.
An image audit is one of the fastest wins available on an established site. It's also standard practice in every site Awesome Website Guys builds and maintains, so speed never silently erodes. See how we keep sites fast at our care plans.
