Image is a must-have on a website for it is the key point to make a website eye-catching and vivid. Posting the reasonable quantity of images on the web page makes the whole site attractive. As a matter of fact, some oversize images slow the page loading time in most cases and the messy codes make it bad for SEO.
For some readers run the websites mainly for online shopping, news, promotion or other sites coming with numerous images showcase, image optimization is a skill that they should master. In fact, it is not a big matter to optimize an image as long as you follow the tips we suggest as below.
Resize the Image Properly
Honestly, an image is not the bigger, the better. Sometimes the oversize images make adverse effect on the website because visitors have to wait for a long time to download the whole image. For some people cannot view the image after a few minutes, they may lose patience to stay on your website any longer. Thus, resizing an image is a critical step to speed up your website.
You’d better match the posts with some moderate size which should be within 500×500 pixel. For instance, the common-used dimensions are 150×150, 200×200, 250×150, etc. In this case, visitors will not take too much time to load the images so that they can browse a web page at a faster speed.
Nowadays, there is an abundance of image resize tools or image optimization plugins in the market, from which you can choose one to optimize the size of an image with ease.
Name the Images Descriptively
Many people prefer to search for an image on the Internet and store it on their own computers without modifying the tedious name, which is not SEO-friendly. A good habit to rename an image is to use the words related to the information that is delivered from that image.
In addition, the wording should be as concise as possible and include highly searched keywords so that it is more likely to be searched by people on the search engines. If you have no idea about how to choose a great keyword, we suggest you to do it by means of Google Adwords, which is the most authoritative platform including numerous ideas of keyword search.
Optimize the Alt Tag Explicitly
The alt tag is an attribute used to describe the information of an image briefly. If an image cannot be displayed on the browser, the alt tag is an alternative in this situation. Sometimes, when people rest the mouse on one image, they can also view the alt tag and get to know what information this image conveys to readers.
Generally, the source code of an alt tag is like what we highlight in the picture as below. In this section, you need to explain the uploaded image with a few words. For instance, if there is a little boy on the image, you’d better set the alt tag as “little boy”.
Choose the Right Image File Type
There are three file types available to post images, including JPEG, GIF and PNG. Each of them should be used in a particular situation. However, some people always misuse of the image file type, making it not optimized enough. Here, let’s check more details as below.
- JPEG is the most frequently-used lossy compression method for digital images. Users are allowed to adjust the degree of compression as they want, making the image quality along with low file size.
- GIF, a common format used for icons or images with lower quality than JPEG.
- PNG is recognized as an alternative to GIF for it supports more colors. However, the file size is larger than JPEG. If you have a serious limitation on the image size, you need to use this image file type carefully.
In the end, we would like to say, whatever kind your website is, you need to manage all the images in a proper way and bear in mind that the image optimization is a long way to go. Only if you have more to do with the images, the website can keep fascinating and eye-catching.
