How to optimize images for the Web?

When the World Wide Web was born, the only content people referred to was text. Even today, many people perceive content as text. However, with the development of new technologies and different changes in search engines, the term content has evolved to include rich media such as videos, PDFs, and images.

In today’s competitive world, you must make use of any and all advantages you can gain over your competitors. Nowadays, one can see combined search results where you can see text and images, videos and other features together. As a result, you can’t ignore images if you’re running a business. In addition, users are becoming increasingly impatient due to the combination of the web and mobile devices. Visitors get very irritated when a website runs slowly. That’s why it’s important to optimize images for the web. This can help you deal with the problems of mixing rich media with text and improve the speed of your site.

What does image optimization mean?

Depending on the context, the phrase image optimization can have two meanings. In terms of compressions, optimization refers to using the smallest or most compressed version of the image in a more suitable format without losing its visual acceptability.

From an SEO point of view, it refers to helping search engines associate the site’s keywords with the images that are used. If your images are optimized, they will appear in image search results when users search for relevant keywords.

How to optimize images?

Choose the right format

There are different types of image formats that are available. Some of these formats are suitable for the web such as GIF, JPEG, PNG, etc. However, each of these formats will handle the elements of an image differently. The first step in the image optimization process is choosing the appropriate format for your image.

save for web

If you create images in Photoshop, you have the option of saving them for the web instead of just saving the images to your system. If you save for the web, you can choose the format you want the image to be saved in and the level of optimization. You can also preview the image before saving to ensure that its quality is not lost.

Do not scale the images.

Many developers, when saving images in large sizes, scale the images while coding the pages instead of resizing to the page dimensions. As a result, the larger image must be uploaded to your server before it is scaled and displayed on the screen. This will slow down the image and the site. Therefore, the image should always be saved according to its final display size and should not be scaled.

Naming the file intuitively

When naming the image file, it’s important to realize that search engines can’t actually read images. The file name will be one of the ways they will understand what the image is about. If you name the image using random letters and numbers, the search engine won’t understand what it is. That’s why it’s important to use intuitive file names when saving images so that both people and search engines understand what they’re looking at.

alternative text

ALT refers to an attribute in HTML that allows you to give an alternative text to your images if they don’t load. Originally it was intended for people with visual impairments. However, today, it is used as one of the ways to tell search engines what the image is about. You can describe the image in the ALT text and use relevant keywords in the most meaningful way possible.

photo title

Search engines can also associate images with the text that surrounds them. You can use captions to add relevant text to surrounding images.

Placement of the images

Search engines can associate the images with the text that is given around them. Therefore, it will be helpful to place the image near a paragraph that is more relevant to what is in the image.

Although these are some of the important aspects of image optimization, there are also several finer points that we need to consider when optimizing images, such as keyword research, anchor text optimization, file size optimization , etc. Since images play a huge role in how people perceive your site and how it performs in search results, it’s important to partner with a company that offers both web design and internet marketing services to its clients. If you can find such a designer, you won’t have to find another person or company to handle your internet marketing.