You’ve just done a killer headshot session for your work team and you’re ready to upload the headshots to your company website.

But what should you name the files and what should you write as the alt text?

Every little detail matters when it comes to SEO.

For arguments sake I’m writing this for my clients who are mainly professionals and will mainly use their headshots on company websites. Specifically in ‘Meet The Team’ or ‘About’ pages on the company website.

It’s not an exact science. Don’t overthink it too much and the most important thing? Don’t stuff your file names and alt text with keywords. Google will penalise you.

We are going to cover 3 topics. File sizes, file names and alt descriptions for headshots.

Optimise your headshot image sizes.

You want to optimise to Goldilocks image sizes. Not too big, not too small – just right. About 200Kb is about right. You might need a bit larger for a full width hero image.

Too small and the images will look blurry or pixelated. Too large and your SEO and website will take a hit and the page will take forever to load.

Think about how big the image will be on your site and work from there. If it’s a headshot file of your team, I’m guessing it won’t take up the whole page and will be a medium/small square. In that case about 1500-2000 pixels on the long edge is plenty.

How your headshots and website images appear on your website is crucial. I judge a website harshly if the images don’t look sharp or take forever to load. If a business doesn’t care about the details, why would I give them my business?

I give my clients 2 low res sizes – usually about 2300 pixels and 2000 pixels. So you upload the 2000 pixel image? Not so fast.

You’ll want to optimise that file using a service like TinyJPG. It’s free and super easy to use. If you want to take a deep dive into optimising headshots I’ve got a blog post on that!

If I’m using an image as a hero shot – full width of a webpage I usually use about 2300 pixels on the long edge.

Write SEO friendly headshot filenames.

I’m going to keep this as simple as possible. Let’s say Skye Blogs is a criminal lawyer. Use Skye-Blogs-Criminal-Lawyer.jpg. as the filename. You could include the company, there’s pros and cons for both. But let’s not overthink it. Keep the names short. Use hyphens to link words don’t use underscores.

I’ll add a caveat for using people’s names though. Depending on company policy, you might want to check whether people want their names connected to their photo on the internet. It could be an issue for someone in cyber security for example.

Also, keep the names short and don’t use joining words like and or if etc. Don’t name a file like Skye-Blogs-Is-A-Lawyer-At-Blogs-Criminal-Specialty-Lawyers-In-Melbourne.jpg for example. Don’t do that. Promise me.

For this headshot I would name the filename Nicholas-Carlton-Spoony-CEO.jpg

Write SEO friendly alt text.

Ok file names done. Tick. Now for Alt Text. What’s that you ask? Alt text might be used by a screen reader for a vision impaired person for example. It also helps give Google more context for what the image is of. Keep the description short. Imagine you’re describing the photo to a friend.

Avoid using race or gender unless you know for sure how the person wants to be identified. It’s best to keep it neutral if you’re not sure.

If it’s for a company website and the person is ok with being identified you could say ‘Skye Blogs, lawyer at Blogs & Co. Smiling in a navy jacket and white shirt against a white background,’ or ‘Toby Blogs, engineer at Toby & Co, with a confident expression, wearing a black suit and sitting at a desk’.

For the previous image I’d write the alt tag: Nicholas Carlton, CEO of Spoony startup. Smiling in a black tshirt against a blue and pink gradient.

Where do you fill in the alt text you ask? That will depend on your website host. It’s usually near the image details.

In a WordPress blog or website, the alt text location is shown below:

If you don’t know the person’s name, avoid using race or gender unless you know for sure how the person wants to be identified. It’s best to keep it neutral if you’re not sure.

And that’s it. At Photoform* in Melbourne, we give you a head start by using best practice naming conventions for your headshot files.