Learning some image optimization techniques will help a great deal to improve your website. By optimizing your site’s images, it improves not only the loading speed and the user experience, but it also enhances its SEO. If your website has the right SEO and qualities, Google will trust your site more.
What Is Image Optimization
Before knowing how you can SEO optimize your image, it is essential to learn what is image optimization first.
Assuming that you have a website. When you use media like photos and videos, it will cause the loading of your webpage to slow down because of their massive file size. You optimize an image when you reduce its file size without losing the quality of it.
It also includes properly labeling your images.
As a result, search engines, such as Google, will rank your images.
How to Optimize an Image for Web Without Losing Quality
Now that you know what image optimization can do to your website and photos, it is time to learn how to optimize them without sacrificing the quality.
- Use alt attributes that tell what the image is.
- Label your images accurately and descriptively using relevant keywords.
- Choose the right dimensions and angles.
- Lower the file size of the images to speed up the loading time.
You may think that the first three points are easy because you have direct control over them. You can control how you want your image to appear. You can use a high-end camera and lighting to capture a photo of your subject at the ideal angle. You can also describe it accurately as the image’s description and use the right keywords.
However, when it comes to decreasing the file size without losing the image quality, that is the time when it becomes more complicated.
Here are the things that you can do to lower the file size:
- Choose the appropriate file format for your image.
- Compress the file size by using image compression tools
You can choose among the GIF, PNG, and JPEG formats. However, each has its pros and cons. GIF image formal is low in file size, but also inferior in quality. PNG allows you to have a transparent background, but the file size can be massive. JPEG will enable you to balance the quality of the image and the file size.
JPEG is the most common choice for the web, but not all the time. With JPEG, you can compress it at a smaller file size without losing much of its quality. Yet, there are times when JPEG may not be the best file format on your image.
There are times when JPEG compression may not work on some images. This time, you will need to use the PNG file format. PNG is also handy when you need to edit the photo many times.
You may also lower the file size of your image by using image compression tools.
Optimizing your images is one way to improve your website ranking. Therefore, you should apply the image optimization techniques for better user experience and faster loading time.
