Why Image Optimization Is Important
“A picture paints a thousand words.” This universally accepted proverb perfectly expresses current trends. Nowadays we love to collaborate with visual pictures rather than words. The importance of images is gradually increasing on website quality, so that the only thing, which matters is image optimization.
What Is Image Optimization and Why It Is Important
Optimizing images is the process of delivering images in high-quality, format, dimensions, and resolutions, keeping the smallest possible file size. Image boost ensures that the resulting image is appropriate for the specific content, the overall website design, and finally your visitors’ expectations, regardless of the requesting device.
Photo Credits to Lucep
Why is image development important? When it comes to your website optimization, visual icons play a significant role. Images connect the visitors to your product/service, especially when they are the key factors of your content. Let’s consider the results of image escalation influence in detail:
Improves Image Searches
Images help a writer to clarify the concept of the content, at the same time making it easy for users to get the content. Optimizing images for search engines helps you to rank higher in Google Image Search results. This is important in small business SEO services. Here you target at increasing the visibility of your brand and driving huge traffic to your site by appearing more frequently in the search engine results. Google or any other search engine will only take in your content if it is of the highest quality.
Increases Page Load Speed
Compared to written content or general design elements, images are larger files. That’s why they require a considerable amount of space and internet speed to load. Here is where optimization comes into play.
Photo escalation improves your site speed. It shows a faster experience for your website visitors. As a result, more people interact with your product/service. Meanwhile, you save some gigabytes of space for your server.
Get More Clicks
Visual item is the key. Images present the visual elements of any website, blog, or content. People like to share pages with relevant pictures on social media rather than transparent text content.
A post, shared on social media, gets higher clicks if there is an attractive image included. But merely involving images is never enough. You should optimize images for the web to make an easy-to-use website.
Optimizing images for search engines
You’ve already known that image optimization aims at attracting new visitors by delivering a high-quality image with the smallest possible size. Some elements impact these features of images: image quality, size, format, and metadata. Image quality adjustment to a level, which still provides an excellent visual experience, is one of the most powerful free image optimization tools.
Optimizing images, you manage to transfer them at even less than the original file size with an unnoticeable visual difference. Choosing the appropriate format to display your images results in serious file size savings without losing the quality. Images contain a lot of unnecessary metadata stored by the cameras and other devices. While boosting images, you avoid delivering this redundant data.
Free Optimization Tools for image quality, size
Compressing your visual elements before uploading online is a smart decision for an image boost. The fantastic thing about this is that free image optimization tools consist the majority. Below are some of the bests:
Tiny PNG
This tool is one of the oldest and most efficient free photo optimization tools.
Using a sharp compression technique, Tiny PNG reduces the size of your PNG files. It decreases the number of colors in your image so that fewer bytes are required to store the data. The unnoticeable change causes a huge difference in the size which in its turn makes page load time faster.
Gift of Speed
Gift of Speed is an online JPEG Compressor and Resizer. By adjusting the quality and/or the size of the image, this free engine compacts the size of your JPEG files to a smaller one.
Optimizilla
Optimizilla displays an excellent image quality with the lowest file size possible. This tool enables you to compress your JPEG and PNG photos. Its cool slider shows the before and after versions which helps you to compare the quality and size before delivering.
Best Image optimization tips in 2019
The image file size may disproportionately affect page load time, so it is essential to make it right. JPEG is usually more SEO-friendly than PNG, especially if you do not have a transparent background because it offers a better compression rate. With search by image, people find logos and other high-resolution relevant images in multiple suitable formats like jpg/jpeg, png, and gif as well.
When it comes to SEO image, using the appropriate keywords to rank your webpage up on the search engine becomes a priority. Here you’ll find the best image optimization tips in 2019:
Name your images
When you choose a photo to display, it gets a name like “IMG_01” from the camera. You must replace it with the title with a keyword-rich one to help the search engines to understand your image and promote your SEO value.
Let’s take this image, if you want to use this one and your target keyword is “mobile app development”, you must change the title of the photo to “mobile app development”.
Write a friendly alt text
Alt tags come to help when the browsers can’t correctly render your images. We can say alt tag is the text alternative of the image that brings your SEO value.
Make sure that your alt tag corresponds to your picture and makes it relevant to the content.
A bright example of alt and title is alt=“Website optimization” title="Website optimization”.
Reduce your image file size
When a customer visits your website, it takes some time to load the content depending on the size of your files. The larger your file size is, the longer it takes to load your page.
The average page load time is globally increasing, and visitors click away at the slow-loading websites. Reducing your file size is one of the best image optimization tips in 2019.
By decreasing the size of your image file, you increase your site speed decreasing the percentage of visitor’s loss. Another good point is that your page shows a similar experience regardless of the device.
Conclusion
Generally speaking, in the big sketch of SEO, image optimization plays a crucial role in its certain components, tools, and tips.
Even if you aren’t concerned about getting more traffic from the image search result, you can spend a few minutes on image optimization. As a result, Google rewards you - potential searchers arrive at your website!
Article by:
Vera Mirzoyan
Published on:
February 06, 2019
Last updated on:
September 02, 2021