How To Optimize Images For Your Website

It’s a well-known fact that visual content greatly enhances user engagement. When you think about it, it makes sense because it makes the text appealing and memorable. Jeff Bullas, the word’s top social marketing influencer, claims that illustrated articles (infographics, gifs, etc.) receive 94% more views than those without. The same applies to Facebook posts: photo reviews get 37% more engagement than just writing.

When it comes to editing, you can customize images within the text to make content searchable and better for search. We will talk about some practices on how to do it later in the article. Enhancing the images helps users find the content when the images are well-executed because Google numbers them.

Surprisingly, not many website owners are paying attention to how well the images on their sites are optimized. You shouldn’t overlook this aspect because it gives you a competitive advantage if you pay attention to the importance of optimizing images.

Optimized vs unoptimized images

Image processing saves and sends images in the smallest file size without compressing the overall image quality.

While the process sounds complicated, it is relatively easy these days. We can use one of many photoshop application plugins and tools to automatically compress images up to 80% without any significant image quality loss.

Image Dimensions

Usually, when we import an image from the phone or digital camera, we have a very high resolution and large file size (height and width). Typically, these images have a 300 DPI resolution with a size starting at 2000 pixels and more. These high-quality images are perfect for print or desktop printing. They are not suitable for websites.

Reducing the file size to lower quality logically can significantly reduce the image file size. Don’t merely resize images using photo editing software on the computer. For example, we have created an image with an original file size of 1.8 MB, 300 DPI resolution, and an image size of 4900 × 3200 pixels.

We chose the jpeg format for high density, changed the size to 1200 × 795 pixels, and reduced the image file size to 103 KB. That is 94% less than the original file size. Now that we have identified three critical elements to the use of an image.

Insert Keywords into your image descriptions

Whether we showcase the articles by photographing them or adding our tutorials with graphs and charts, always add captions to the pictures that include the keywords on that particular page. This way, we will enter the SEO value on the page and adjust the image simultaneously. We can use SE Ranking’s keyword suggestion tool to find the best keywords for particular content.

Optimize Alt text of images

Alt annotation for your image text may be one of the most important parts of enlarging our images. It is the other text we provide to search engines. Search engines cannot “read” an image, which is why it’s essential to add well-executed alt text to the visual content. Alt-text is available for image tag: <img src = “imagename.jpg” alt = “se_ranking_keyword_suggestion_tool” />.

Image making is critical for those who run an eCommerce project. Make sure everything you sell has a different alt tag. The text should not be more than 125 characters.

The same advice applies to thumbnail images. That’s easy to repeat and miss alt text be careful. 

Alt tags and file names are all content for search engines, so make sure you provide crawlers with well-formatted and accurate information. Image names are mostly overlooked and therefore ignored by search engines. Once again, this can give you a competitive edge if you use it properly. According to the latest Google notes, file names should be short and descriptive. Format with a dash (not less). Name your file correctly before uploading it to your CMS to keep the record searchable and executed right from the start.

How Do You Add Alt Text in WordPress site? 

It’s extremely easy to add alt text in WordPress without any coding. You simply go to your media tab on the left side of your admin panel. Then click on the image you want to add the alt text and you’ll see this screen:

How Do You Add Alt Text in a Wix site? 

Optimizing images for mobile viewing 

Responsive design, native mobile programs, and mobile designs! The world has shrunk into smart device screens, so your visual content should also be appropriate. An easy way to enlarge mobile devices’ image is to increase its size to fit the smaller screen. You can split important visual content like infographics into sections, so it doesn’t overwhelm your mobile readers.

However, the best solution would be to create a responsive structure for your website. Smartphones and tablets aren’t going anywhere, so they can better accommodate the needs of those visitors right away.

Images that work well in Google image search will improve your SEO metrics and user experience for your website, so make sure enlarge and maximize your images. Note that creating realistic images will also help you get quality links and increase your website’s overall authority.

Final words on image optimization

If you’re not optimizing web images, then you should start now. It will make a massive difference in your site speed, and your users will thank you for it. It’s proven that fast websites are useful for SEO, and you will likely see an increase in your search engine rankings within a month or so. 

In addition to image performance, two things that will help you significantly speed up your website are the WordPress caching plugin and the WordPress CDN. Alternatively, you can use a WordPress hosting company because it usually provides caching and CDN as part of the platform.

We hope this article has helped you learn how to optimize the image as per the SEO standards.