Optimising your images provides a easy SEO win. Google, as clever as it is, doesn’t really know what is being displayed on an image. However, there are areas of an image that can be utilised to help Google understand.
The first and easiest way is the actual name of the image. Images straight of a phone or digital camera are usually titled by the date, or camera make and some random ID. Changing this title, before uploading will be a big help to Google to understand what the image actually shows.
Image Optimisation
Images affect a website more than you would think. A website without images will be a boring site to use and not many people would spend time looking through a page that resembles Wikipedia.
Too many images that are not compressed will reduce the load speed to something resembling dial-up internet if you can remember that!
What to optimise
Image titles
As mentioned above, changing the title of the image is a good indicator as to what the image actually is. A title of “web-design-banner” is better than ‘OLYMPUS022321’ for example.
Alt text
Alt text, or alternative text is a snippet of text you can add into the meta fields of the image to describe what is on the image. It is used by screen readers to describe the image to people with a disability as well as being read by Google. A correct image title and Al text will help rank the image higher on google when searching on the ‘images’ tab. Perfect for very visual businesses.
Compression
Compressing or optimising images before uploading will help to reduce the file size of an image without losing the quality. Images straight from a mobile or digital camera are very high quality so that the image can be displayed crisp at large sizes. This level of quality is not needed for websites and will only mean that the image takes longer to load. You can use free software o the web to help you optimise the image before uploading. I recommend Optimizilla.
If you want any help optimising the images on your site, or improving the loading speed of your website, please feel free to get in touch with us by following the link underneath.
