7 Ways to Improve Your Website Photos for SEO
Want to know how to optimize your images so they're not only beautiful but also optimized for SEO, conversion, and branding? Optimize your images for better search engine results by using these seven techniques.
Use Professional Photos for Website
The first thing you need for optimizing photos on your website is professional photos. The grainy photos and over filtered selfies are fine for Instagram, but your website needs top-quality.
If you have a good camera or a phone with a decent camera you can try taking photos yourself. (Looking for photography tips? Check out 5 tips for better product photography. )
If you're not sure you can do the photos justice, we recommend getting some professional photos taken for your website or using quality stock photos. Whether we like to admit it or not, we all judge books by their cover and your website photos are the biggest visual indication of polished or sloppy.
Create a Better Image Title Tag.
A good image title tag will help people find your images more easily. It should contain relevant keywords and describe what the image is about. You can use tools like Google Webmaster Tools to see how well your titles perform.
Add Alt Text to Images.
If you upload an image to your website, make sure to add alt text to it. This is the text that appears when someone has turned off the image display option.
It is helpful for the visually impaired, and alt text also provides search engines with information to read images. Use keywords in describing what the image contains in order to make it work for both purposes.
Reduce File Size with Compression.
Don't forget to compress your image files before uploading them to your website, otherwise the large files can significantly slow your website down. There are several different compression formats available, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. JPEG is the most common format used by web designers because it produces high quality images at a reasonable size. However, it does not compress as well as other formats. PNG is another popular format that compresses better than JPEG.
A great tool for compressing images is squoosh.app. Upload your image and compress the file size to make it smaller, but keep the quality of the photo intact.
Compressed images make web pages load faster. Slow-loading web pages cause people to get impatient and bounce from your website, which starts to negatively impact search engine optimization.
Find out more about how to resize images for websites.
Remove Unnecessary Whitespace.
If you’re using an image editor, make sure you remove any unnecessary whitespace before uploading your image. This might mean cropping the image or ensuring it does not have a random border. This will help reduce file size of your image and speed up loading times. Anything you can do to help web pages look great and load quickly will benefit SEO.
Optimize Images for Mobile Devices.
Also use responsive design when creating web pages. Responsive design allows users to view your site on mobile devices without having to download additional software. It’s easy to implement responsive design with Wix, WordPress, as well as other CMS platforms.
Optimizing images for mobile means you make sure they aren't so big that they take up the whole screen or require scrolling from side to side to view images. It is also critically important that large photos or videos don't slow down your website on mobile .
On your mobile website design, don't overload your pages with images - keep it scaled-back and simple. And avoid photos that are too busy or overlap with text as this can be hard to read.
Name Images with Keywords.
If you've ever tried to upload an image to a website, you probably noticed that there was a file name associated with it. This might be something like IMG_4027.jpg or IMG_1248.HEIC. These are default file names for photos that come out of your camera.
Did you know that you can (and should) change image file names? You can use keywords in your file name to describe the image, and to link it to your brand.
If you upload your IMG_4027.jpg, when people search Google for images, they won't find your site because the image isn't named with keywords to connect the search with the image. To fix this problem, use a naming convention that includes keywords related to your business.
Need more on Keywords Basics? Click here.
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