There are many different SEO techniques that can be used to optimise a website, but many find themselves asking the question “how important is it, to optimise a website’s images?” What some don’t know is that optimising the images on a website can be just as important as the rest of the content on a site.
There are several different reasons for this. Search engine sites such as Google are more likely to rank a website higher when they have good quality and unique image.
Furthermore, they usually have the option to name the image when uploading it to a site, so it can be named relevant keywords. For an example, a vegan cooking website could name an image “vegan cooking recipe”. It is also important to ensure that any photos used will be good quality when viewing on computers, tablets, and smart phones alike.
Some people will have huge pictures which look great on a laptop, however, they take too long to load when viewing on a mobile phone. For this reason, it is important to reduce the file size of any images used so they can be viewed everywhere.
What else can be done to optimise pictures?
Another great way to optimise images is to ensure that they aren’t too decorative. For example, GIFs are very trendy, however, they also tend to take up a lot of data to load. This can slow down the loading time of a whole website which makes it less likely to be shown in Google search results.
For this reason, it can be a wise move to use mainly JPEG files. Another great thing to do is to concentrate on thumbnail images. They are usually shown on shop products or when sharing a link on social media.
It is important to ensure that thumbnail pictures are quite small, so they don’t slow down the overall loading time. And, of course, it is important to ensure that all images are not blurry, are professional, and are relevant. If stock images are to be used, it is a good idea to find ones that are less popular.
This may take a little bit of hunting but will improve the visibility of a site overall. In conclusion, thinking about what images to use on a website may seem simplistic but is actually a very powerful SEO tool that will help increase the visibility of any site.