Do you have images on your blog or website? We’re not talking about the images of your web design that are placed in the background; we’re talking about the other areas of your site, such as your blog. Why is it important to include photos on your blog or website? Let’s look at some statistics.
Did you know that pages that have images have around 94% more total views than pages that do not have images? Did you know that 60% of people are more likely to consider your business or your product when an image pops up in their search results? Images are essential to the ecommerce world. In fact, many people say that the quality of a product image (and the fact that the product has an image) is more important than the descriptions. When you are including images on your site, you have to follow a few simple rules.
Professional quality images
First, the images actually have to look great. Professional photography is ideal, but if you or someone you know can take quality photos, you may not need to hire a pro. A very good alternative to that is to purchase stock images from websites like iStock or Fotolia. Be wary of using images from search engines like Google to avoid any copyright issues.
Make Images SEO friendly
The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is very true. However search engines do not read images so be sure to include Alt Tags, which is nothing but the naming of the image. For example if you are an online furniture store, instead of naming an image of a Sofa “image1.jpg” name it RedSofaLeather.jpg so search engines will index it.
Don’t over do it
Having an abundance of photos is great, but try to limit them to one or two per article or post. The flipside of having images is that they are can be heavy and tend to slow affect the page’s load speed. So it’s important to balance the number of images with site speed.
Compress images
While you do need high resolutions images for the web page to look professional, they account for the most downloaded bytes on the website. Here is Google’s guide to optimizing images. Basically the idea is to balance image quality with resolutions.
- If it’s a background, make sure file size is under 5KB, up to 2KB would be better.
- If the image is a layout header, up to 40KB is acceptable.
- If it’s an image to be displayed on the page, up to 70KB is reasonable, depending on dimensions.
- Artworks and photographs for your portfolio may be saved in better quality, since people who will look at them already expect to see large images. In this case it’s normal to have file sizes from 100 to 200KB, but not more than that.
(Source for image specifications: http://inobscuro.com/)
If you are building a site, and need help with the web design, contact a web design company in New York. We can strategically create content proven to increase your SEO results.
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