Author: Dr. Manus Ward │Head of Digital Strategy and Data Protection │Hotelconsultant.com is a qualified and experienced former hotel manager, culinary Olympic team manager and hospitality Head of School who is passionate about passing on the knowledge he gained from one of the few hotel digital strategy doctorates in the world to you the hotelier. Bonus: If you have any problems with this contact me (100% free) at manus@hotelconsultant.com or 086 8185829 on this or any aspect of your hotel’s digital strategy.
Why do we need to do this
Google has yet not reached a point where it can assess the quality or relevancy of an image based on the image alone. It must instead examine the file name, alt text, title, description and caption etc in an image in order to figure what an image is all about and then decide on its rankings in the search engine.
What does this mean
While image analysing technology has come a long way Google still can’t figure out what an image is really all about so it relies on the various pieces of text associated with a photo in order to figure out how to rank images in Google.
What do I do: First do some keyword research and find the keywords that are the most appropriate to your hotel or activities that will bring guests to your hotel and use this exact phrase for your photos. For example if your image is the kids swimming pool in the Park Hotel and Google Keyword Planner says “swimming pool for kids” and “Park Hotel” are good keywords we would use them in our image text.
What to do:
Always use the hotel name at the start.
Place keywords in the file name, alt text, title, description and caption of an image.
Limit alt text to 150 characters.
Put strongest keywords at the start.
Place your town or city in the text.
Always use © symbol at end.
Shrink resolution to minimise download speed.
What not to do:
Don’t use underscores, +signs, or Camel Casing in file names.
Leave out non keywords such as “the”, “a”, “she”.
Put – in between words so that search engines can differentiate words.
Do not use generic words like “hotel pool”.
So our text will be “Park-Hotel-Dublin-swimming-
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