Optimising Website Images
Posted by betwixtmarketing on November 30, 2007
Many website owners understand the benefits of optimising their on-page content, text and copy. Fewer, however are aware of the search engine optimisation (seo) benefits from optimising website images.
GIF’s and JPEG’S
If you want to optimise your website images the first thing you need to know about is the two image formats recognised by your web browser. These are GIF and JPEG. Both JPEG and GIF are compressed. That means that information has been organised inside the file in a special way in order to minimise the file size.
The difference between JPEG and GIF is the way that they compress the data. JPEG compression is designed to optimise photographs or images with fine gradations of colour. GIF compression is designed to optimise images with large continuous areas of colour, such as illustrations.
Image Search
To leverage image search, the image file names could use keywords relevant to the product. Alt text used in the coding of the web page describing the image could do the same as well as a short text caption beneath the image.
The image(s) can be submitted to image sharing web sites like Flickr.com with relevant keywords in the image category, title, description and tags. The description of the product on the image sharing site can include a link back to the product web page on the company web site.
Associating relevant keywords with the image will help media or image search engines understand what the image is, and subsequently categorise and rank it. The link from the image description on the image sharing site can send both visitors and search engines to the product page.
LASTLY…
DO NOT resize your images in your website design program. The result will be a small image with the same file size.
Resize your image in your image editing program.
Wade said
I usually use Photoshop CS3 to do all my images. GIF is usually of choice because of the smaller file size and the ability to have a transparent background. I use a jpg for the header image so I can have a good quality image. Photoshop is able to resize images and keep quality. Nobody likes a plain text site, but nobody wants to wait 5 minutes for the page to load because you used a cheap image software that make them all 700k images.