You might spend a lot of time agonizing over getting the written content of your website just right, and making sure it’s optimized for search engines without seeming artificial or lacking in quality.

What about your images, however? Are you giving them the same level of attention, particularly when it comes to optimization?

For many bloggers and business owners with websites, the answer is probably no.

Images and pictures are an essential aspect of designing a website and ensuring it’s appealing to visitors and also ranks well in search engines. Good quality images are not only going to boost your SEO, but they also tend to increase conversions by giving site visitors a better experience and inspiring them to spend more time on your site, while building a better connection with them.

Below are some easy ways to optimize your site’s images to make sure they’re improving your site’s performance.

Give Your Images Simple Names

If you’re taking your own photos for your website, they may have a name that’s automatically given to them by your computer or camera. Don’t use the default name.

Not only can adding clear, descriptive names to your images help you in terms of organization and productivity, but it’s also important for SEO. Use keywords in the names of your images because search engines crawl the names of image files.

Don’t Skip the Alt Tags

No matter what you do when it comes to images on your site, don’t omit the alt tags. Alt tags give your site a lot of value in terms of SEO because they provide a relationship between images and keywords. Having alt tags is the best way to get the pictures on your site to show up in Google Images.

Much like you do when you’re coming up with image names, keep the alt tags really straightforward and easy to understand, and while you can add keywords, don’t try to make them one solid string of keywords. Simpler is better here.

Go With the Right Size

Something that’s often overlooked in website design and adding images is the importance of the actual size of the picture. You don’t want to add a picture to your site that’s a huge file. Not only do super-huge images impact your SEO, but they also tend to slow your website down, which negatively impacts the user experience.

If you have a picture that’s too big, you can change it in a resizing tool, Photoshop, or even something as simple as MS Paint. It’s incredibly easy to get optimized images in terms of size when you use Photoshop because you can choose the “Save For Web” option. That automatically resizes your image without sacrificing quality.

If you don’t have Photoshop, there are also apps that you can work with, and many of them are free.

Just by keeping the above image tips in mind, you can improve the design of your website and also enhance its search engine optimization, with minimal effort.