One highly overlooked but very effective method of SEO is the use of images.  Many times Image SEO can even drive more traffic than other SEO methods because Google gives visual content (images and video) preferential display.   Follow the tips below to optimize your Image SEO and nudge past your competitors —

1. Use visually familiar images – One great thing about the Logistics Industry is its people and the equipment they use.  Drivers are a very close-knit community and equipment is a big selling point for drivers and customers alike. Use this to your advantage and post many different pictures online which illustrate what your culture looks like and what type of equipment you have– make sure that your images are clear and easily distinguishable as every day objects or scenes that your viewer will recognize.  Where do you post?  Place pictures on your homepage, About Us page, Contact page, Services page(s) and social media sites.
2. Include local keywords in your image filenames – The search engines favor filenames that are relevant especially for local searches.  Include local keywords that describe what your image is about and that will be easy for the search engines to pick up on.  See an example below.  Notice the use of dashes, this is a good practice as search engines can easily separate out the different words and combine them into various keyword phrases that users may enter.  When you separate words with spaces, underscores or other characters, some servers may have trouble recognizing the different words and separating them out.
   ltl-truck-driver-atlanta.jpg 
   
3. Use ALT text to describe your images – When embedding images on your website, make sure to enter ALT (or alternate) text which helps the search images understand what your images are about.  This text is also displayed in place of your image when your image cannot be shown on screen for whatever reason.  When uploading images to your website, you should be given an option to enter ALT text if you are using a modern CMS like WordPress.  You can also add it via HTML similarly to the example below.
   <img src=”www.mblogitstics.com/images/ltl-truck-driver-atlanta.jpg” alt=”LTL Truck Driver in Atlanta Traffic”> 
   
4. Save your images with a small file size – Page load time is a very important factor to improving your SEO score and retaining visitors.  Including just one very large image on your website can slow it down immensely.  It’s important to save any images on your website in as small a file size as possible.  If you have access to image editing software like Photoshop, you can choose to save your images for the web.  If not, there are free options online which allow you to convert your images to a smaller size like Image Optimizer.  On a related note, do not let visitors’ browsers resize images.  Instead of embedding a very large image and inserting image size tags to resize it dynamically when it loads, resize it to desired size in image editing software so that no dynamic resizing is necessary.

So there you have it.  Don’t miss out on your chance to fully optimize your website for the search engines.  Just a couple of minutes spent updating your images can bump you up to the top of search results!