There might be an issue in finding the right balance between a well-optimized image that conserves its visual quality to a fast and high-quality website. Well, the better question would be to ask, whether optimized images would help and complement your SEO efforts? We should not end up in adding pictures to our website content just for the sake of placing some images in the content. This is not an ideal way to use any visual content. There are many situations when pixels get sacrificed and pictures end up looking very bad. There are many available methods to optimize an image and still maintain its quality. SEO Company works out with many image optimizations and brings out ways to guide you to keep your image best for your website. Below the list, the most important Image SEO Tips that help you with image optimization speeds your website and helps you with better SEO rank. a. JPEG Format – Make use of this format, when you have pictures that contain many colours, colour shading, and gradient. b.PNG Format – Make use of this format, when there is a logo. You can also use it when you have a picture with many solid colours and require transparency. c. GIF Format – Make use of this format, when there is an animation. Your content makes more sense when it is supported by the right image in the right format. Many businesses invest in image optimization to enable their website to have an aesthetic appeal. 2. Reduce The Image File Size – Your website’s speed increases, when you reduce the image quality. When the website loads faster, it will experience a better user experience that would lead to increased conversions. When there is a slight delay in page response it would reduce conversion. Images if not properly reduced, it could bring out a bigger problem for mobile users. Images take more space on a webpage and if they are big it slows down the page load and users tend to skip searching. Image size is given by its quality or number of pixels. When the image has many pixels, it leads to a larger size, quality, and dimension. Many available tools help to reduce the image size without sparing on its quality. For example, in Adobe Photoshop, there is an option to optimize an image for the file types JPEG and PNG. The steps for the same are seen in the option Export – Save for Web – Quality. Enter the quality percentage. When the percentage is high, the photo quality is better. 3. Save Images With Small Resolutions – Yet another Image SEO Tips is to save images at a small resolution. Resolutions indicate the number of pixels that an image contains. An editing software identifies the resolution as the image’s height, width and the number of pixels that it has. For a large image, the resolution would be bigger. For example, for a high-quality image with size 1900 X 1180, the resolution would be about 2.24 Megapixels. In a graphic editing software, we can choose your image dimensions and resolution. 4. Resize Images to Scale – When you upload images to your website and require optimizing them, it is always better to resize them to scale and not permit CSS to resize it. This could be applied only in case of any responsive pages or else it does not seem relevant. One more fact that you should not be scaling images without optimizing it. It works best by reducing the files by means of plugins. In WordPress, you would have many advantages for this. In this case, by default, the images get resized when it is added to the media library. The option is easily accessible in Settings – Media. The maximum image width would be close to the width of your website. In this case, CSS would not resize your images to fit it inside. Few more recommendations on this are: a. Make use of the CSS effect as much as possible. b.Save the images at a specific dimension you require instead of allowing HTML or CSS to resize the images. c. Take away the white spaces from the images and try to recreate them with the help of CSS to provide the padding. d. Reduce the bit-depth that matches to a smaller colour palette. e. Choose the web fonts and avoid placing any text within the images as this would save space and there won’t be any problems at scaling. f. Make use of raster images that are represented by a collection of many pixels. 5. Make Use Of Plugins To Reduce The File Size – Plugins works well for image compression. For example, your website can take more space when you add a picture of size 2MB in the library. You should select the plugins that suit your website. For each plugin, the following steps would help you: a.Sign in b. Go to Plugins c.Add New d.Search for the plugin e. Install now f. Activate You could even go to a specific plugin’s settings and check if it is fine. Few plugin examples are WP Smush, Insanity, CW Image Optimizer, SEO Friendly Images, Hammy, and PB Responsive Images. These plugins can be used for image optimization that was loaded earlier. 6. Remove Any Irrelevant Metadata – Metadata refers to the information that is stored in the image file. Usually, it gets generated automatically by the device that captures the image. Additionally, metadata like EXIF data can be manually added by using software specific to it. Information like aperture settings, exposure time, data taken, camera type, and other information gets embedded into an image. This information is important for the website. Sanitizing your images is indeed important and it improves the website’s loading speed time. 7. Image Name And Alt Descriptions – Name your images and add the alt descriptions for the success of SEO. Images should be easy to read by Google and should be friendly. When a user sees an image, he/she should be able to understand the image and its relevance to the website. This would empower SEO success. If required, make use of a description for your image or caption. If you don’t have any information in the file embedded, add it directly at the time when you upload the image to your website. Search engines crawl to both your website and images.
Conclusion
During the time of internet browsing, users might require downloading every file from your website. This means that pictures also get downloaded. Hence images should be reduced by editing their quality settings. The various ways for image optimization are saving an image for the web, make use of image optimization tools, taking irrelevant metadata out, image resizing to scale, and many more.
