I'm typically pretty optimistic when it comes to doing search engine optimization (SEO) for Squarespace, my blogging/content management system (CMS) of choice. Most of what you need is available either out-of-the-box or through a few manual tweaks. Optimizing images for SEO on Squarespace are no exception and come with their own little subtleties. Today we'll explore SEO for images on Squarespace and help drive more traffic to your website.

SEO for Images - The Basics

One of my main duties as an online marketer is to increase website traffic from search engines through the process of SEO. When it comes to images, you can increase traffic through SEO in two ways:

1. Increases traffic via image search engines such as Google Images
2. Boost the ability for the page on which the image resides to rank in the search engines

There are quite a few things you can do to optimizes images for search engines, but the basics include using your page's primary keywords within  the file name and alt attribute of the image. Search engines pay special attention to these properties of the of image. Let's take a look how this works.

Optimizing Squarespace Image Files for SEO

 Optimize Squarespace images in a few easy steps:

1. Always be conscious of the size of your image files. In general, try to keep files in a .png or .jpg format under 200kb. The smaller, the better.
2. Use the primary keyword(s) you intend to you use in your page or blog post within the file name of the image when you upload it to Squarespace. Be sure to use a "-" in between words. For example, if Squarespace Image SEO was your keyword phrase, your image filename might be squarespace-image-seo.jpg. Easy, right?(Separate words with a "-" and use your keywords)
3. Next you'll need to change the alt attribute of your image. Switch to Raw HTML within the editing interface of your blog post or Squarespace web page. (Switch to Raw HTML mode to access your alt attributes)
4. Carefully search through the HTML of the pages to locate your images. I find it's easiest to use Ctrl+F and search the page for alt="" to highlight the image alt attributes within the HTML.(Finding the alt attributes is easy even for HTML novices)
5. Using your keywords, enter a brief description of your image that accurately describes the image for those that may not be able to see it.(Enter your keyword-friendly alt attribute within the quotes of the HTML)

Ultimately it's not too hard to optimize your images for SEO on Squarespace. Once your file is optimized, just be sure that the content on the rest of the page supports your primary keywords as well and you should be all set.

The Big (Optimized) Picture

The last and most often overlooked part of SEO for any website, Squarespace or otherwise, is getting links and attention within social media via Likes and Tweets. Getting someone to talk about you on the web is like an endorsement in Google's eyes. You'll be ranking in no time if you can get build links and attention to a well-optimized page with images.

On that note, if you liked this blog post or any other Squarespace tutorial written here on Big Picture Web, be sure to share it on your preferred social network or write a blog post to explore the topic further. And as always, I'm curious to hear your thoughts in the comments below.