Optimizing Images for SEO

Whether you choose images as part of your story telling or product selling, they are an undeniably important and impactful part of your website. Aside from choosing the right images, optimizing them to ensure they don’t slow down your site is also critical and directly relates to your SEO ranking.

So what the heck is optimizing? In a nutshell it means that the images you choose are properly sized and tagged.

Let’s break this down. Size can mean image size or file size. Image size refers to pixel size as it relates to placement on your website. A few helpful tips are:

Banner images max 1200-1800 in length (400-600 height, horizontal format)
Secondary and product images 800 x 600 (600 x 800)
Thumbnails 300 x 300, 400 x 600, etc.

File size is measured in KB or MB. Hi-Res images can be compressed without affecting the appearance by using a tool such as tinypng.com which can reduce file size up to 80%.

For example, if you have chosen to use a professional photographer, images they provide are generally given in large format/hi-resolution making them suitable for print and can exceed 8000 pixels. If you try to upload these, your website has to do more work to pull, size and load the image thus directly influencing site speed and SEO.

The next step would be image name or tags. Make sure your image names are logical for example:

IMG_3041.jpg vs. white-slipdress-spring2019.jpg

When an image is uploaded to your site, in most cases, you can also add a description or ALT tag. The alt tag is important as it is ADAA compliant for visually impaired visitors and allows Google to index the image (Google can’t see the image, only the text description).

Resources:

tinypng.com