You may have worked long and hard to produce great content for your website but one of the best ways to really attract people to your online presence is to use great images. Showing someone an image of your product or service is often a far more evocative device than telling them about it in words.
How to Optimise Images For Better Performance
If you decide to use images on your website it’s important to make sure that they are optmised to achieve good search engine rankings as well as being attractive and informative for website visitors.
We are going to explain some of the areas you need to concentrate on in order to optimise your images for SEO purposes. Before we do that we want to mention one important aspect of using images for the web. Wherever possible you should use your own images.
More often than not using your own images is more cost effective in the long run. You also have the benefit of access to images which look real as opposed to the myriad of false looking images that you can purchase from stock image suppliers. Now let’s take a look at how to optimise the images you use.
1) Using effective titles
Search engines can see the titles of images you place on the web. This is why it’s so important that you use effective titles. The title you create for an image should include relevant keywords and it also needs to say exactly what the image represents. If you want to optimise your SEO performance you need to make sure your image titles are well thought out and clear.
2) Reducing the size of image files
One of the most off putting issues for people viewing a website is a slow load time. This is often most prevalent when people view web content using a smartphone. Given that this is the way in which most people now access the Internet you cannot afford for your website to have this problem.
If the image files that you use are too big this can have a detrimental effect on the load time of your website. This could cause people to navigate away from your website to a competitor’s. It can also have an adverse effect on your search engine ranking. This is why you should reduce your image files to the optimum size.
3) The importance of alt tags
An alt tag is the text that displays when an image cannot be shown for some reason. It’s also used to help identify images for people who have sight problems. Ideally, your alt tags should contain relevant keywords as well as being descriptive. A good alt tag explains what an image is without the need for someone to see it. It’s a good idea to invest time in creating alt tags that work as doing so can help to improve your SEO performance.
We have introduced you to some effective methods of optimising your images for SEO. If you need any help with doing this then it might be a good idea to look for professional SEO services. The experts can take some of the pressure off your shoulders and make sure that your images are optimised as they should be. 🙂
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