The right naming conventions play a big role in your SEO rankings and resizing your images to Showit’s suggested sizing will help your site’s loading time. Below are a few simple steps you can take to optimize your Showit website’s images before uploading them to your account and implementing them throughout your website.

Let’s begin!

1. IMAGE NAMING

Renaming your images can go a long way with your SEO rankings and help your images (and website) become more searchable. We want to make sure they’re named strategically and include searchable keywords and phrases, not just a random mix of numbers and letters.

For example, if you’re a photographer, including the venue, the city the photo was taken at, the type of session, and your business name is a great place to start.

Here’s some examples:

san-francisco-city-hall-elopement-business-name-001

hollins-house-wedding-business-name-001

big-sur-engagement-session-business-name-001

It’s best to be straight-to-the-point and avoid keyword stuffing. Another tip is to make sure you’re using dashes ( – ) instead of underscores ( _ ) between words, and try to not use the exact same titles for every session or every image.

Always try to put yourself in your client’s shoes and think about what they would be searching for when trying to find a business like yours. They likely don’t know you exist yet, so solely depending on your business name won’t be as beneficial as if you include additional searchable terms that will help lead them to you.

2. NAMING LARGE GROUPS OF IMAGES

My suggestions for renaming large groups of images are 1) Exporting directly from Lightroom. 2) Using Adobe Bridge. I’ve included a screenshot of the settings I use in Adobe Bridge below. Here’s what I do: Select the images I want to rename. Then, go to tools > batch rename.

3. FILE SIZE

Showit suggests exporting your images to 3500px on the long edge with a resolution of 72. The faster your website’s load time is, the higher it will be ranked in searches.

In regards to your gallery images within your portfolio, the more images you have, the longer it will take to load. We recommend only including 25-30 of your best images in a single gallery. I know it can be tempting to include every single photo, but including a smaller sample of 25-30 images of your very best work can help your reader to not feel overwhelmed in having to look through hundreds of images, as well as help with your site’s loading speed.

You can use Adobe Bridge, Photoshop, Lightroom, or Canva, among others to resize your images.

Here is the original article from Showit on how to prepare your images if you’d like to check it out!