The world that you are living in is becoming visual with each passing day. It is important to understand the importance of image optimization and you can never overlook this. Images are responsible for making the web page much more appealing. There should be an image present on all the pages within your website. According to https://www.huffpost.com, SEO is the best way of ensuring that people stumble upon your website. Without proper optimization, you are wasting one of the most valuable SEO assets. Apart from that, if the file size is large, your page is going to take quite a good time to load, which will lead to a high bounce rate, something that you do not want for your website.
Image optimization is responsible for creating several benefits for the image assets, which include a better experience for the users, a fast load time, additional opportunities for a ranking within the search engine, etc. The technology of visual search has indeed improved greatly but you also have to know that the search engine bots are not capable of identifying the content of your image. They are rather dependent on the text that is associated with your images for understanding what your image is about and how it is related to the content.
Several image optimization tips will help you to take your SEO game to the next level. Given below is a list of SEO image optimization tips, which you should consider.
Stock images are not going to help the SEO
You want the images that you are posting to pop up within the website. However, if you are filling the website with numerous stock images, it is going to look that you are unoriginal and your website is similar to those sites that do not stand out. It has been observed that several websites are cluttered with generic stock photos. You need to consider corporate websites, consulting firms, or business firms, which provide the best service to the customers. Almost all websites use the same stock images. You can indeed consider optimizing the stock images but it is not going to have a similar impact or provide the benefits that an original image is capable of providing.
Make use of original and high-quality images
When you have original pictures, you are providing a better experience to the users and you are also working on improving your ranking. You can consider making original images with the help of your designer. Make sure that you are providing the customers a proper glimpse of the company or you can also consider providing high-quality images of products, which your potential customers are going to respond to. Most of the potential customers prefer not to look at stock photos. When you are posting high-quality images, you are going to stand out. Ensure that you are showing the personality of your brand and concentrating on attracting more customers to the website.
Have strong reasons for images
Images have the capability of narrating stories or help in identifying any particular thing or idea. Most people have a habit of learning visually. Images can also have a huge impact on the present as well as potential customers in comparison to having to read long texts. You will indeed be interested in adding images to content that you post; however, you should not always force images. Making use of screenshots is a great way of adding value to the content that you are posting. Images help in complementing the materials present on the blogs, landing pages, and articles. Images will help the audience understand concepts or products.
Take care of copyright
Irrespective of the files that you are choosing, you need to make sure that there is no conflict of copyright. You can be in great legal trouble if you are using images that belong to others without permission. It is always good to take your pictures or use free images that are present all over the internet. Make sure that you are doing this if you want to avoid a heavy lawsuit. You can consider taking help from Socialmarketway.com.
Improve all the images with the help of tools
After you have downloaded the images from the internet, you have the freedom of doing a lot more with those images. You can use tools like Canva, which will help you to add text and personality along with uniqueness to the images, which will help in enhancing the appeal of the images. Most of the hero images, as well as stock images, look even more beautiful when they are enhanced and can even be made more personal by making use of all these tools. You can also create custom social media posts for your business by making use of these amazing tools.
Use optimal file sizes without compromising on quality
Images are undoubtedly one of the most important reasons as to why the websites load slowly. If the speed of your site requires improvement, you have to concentrate on reducing the size of the file of the images with the help of compression and resizing. The image should not be larger in comparison to what it needs to be. You can use several tools to reduce the size of your image without affecting the quality. Resizing the images is a great idea, especially if you are looking to improve the load speed of your website.
Add necessary captions
Adding captions to the images is undoubtedly one of the best practices of image optimization. It can be so that the words that you are putting in within your article will not be read by the readers but they might be interested in reading the text that you are putting under your image. Any option is considered to be extremely beneficial particularly because you are describing the image.
Conclusion
When you consider the tips that have been mentioned above, you can increase both engagements as well as interaction with images that you upload. You can even work on reducing the time taken for the website to load. Image optimization can help with SEO and therefore, you need to make sure that you are following all the tips that have been mentioned above.
Guest post is courtesy of Trudy Seeger