Significance Of Image Optimization – Semalt Expert

Whether you are an affiliate marketer, a blogger or a webmaster, you should know the significance of search engine optimization (SEO). Lisa Mitchell, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, warns that without proper search engine optimization, on-page and off-page SEO, it is not possible to get your articles in front pages of Bing, Yahoo, and Google. Some bloggers and webmasters make sure that their content is fully optimized for Google, but the pictures they use are not properly optimized. It's safe to say that image optimization is the key factor that you should consider because lots of people search for famous pictures. If the images of your blog or website start ranking, chances are you will get a large number of visitors.

Why Do We Need to Optimize Images?

There are various reasons for optimizing your pictures. The images you use in your articles help to improve SEO scores, give an appealing look to your articles, make them search engine friendly, and play a vital role in increasing the page loading speed of your site. There are a lot of benefits of image optimization, for examples photo-sharing websites like Instagram and Pinterest drive quality traffic to your web pages, the images show up in the search engine results, and you can get your pictures ranked higher. Plus, images improve the bounce rate of your website and increase the SEO score. If you focus on creating custom images, you can get quality backlinks when other blogs or websites use your images in their articles as they will give you a credit link.

Find the Right Images for Your Website:

Before you use some images in your articles, I would like to introduce you to some resources where you can access stock images easily. While dealing with the pictures, you should use authentic sources only and avoid using Google Images as most of the pictures are copyrighted in this section. Websites like FreeDigitalPhotos, Pixabay, Wikipedia, and MorgueFile provide lots of stock images, and Shutterstock is the platform where you can get high-quality pictures by paying a few bucks monthly. Whether you use the free sites or paid ones to find suitable photos, you have to be sure you give proper credit to the publisher so that no one bothers you regarding the rights of the pictures.

Create Your Images:

It is also possible to create your photos, and this should be done only when you don't find the perfect pictures on other sources. Canva is an image designing tool, made for both web developers and bloggers, that helps create custom images. Finding lots of pre-made templates and beautiful fonts is easy. You can simply drag the suitable template and font and get your picture ready within minutes.

Optimize Images for Search Engines:

When it comes to optimizing images for search engines, you should select the right file name and download it from a reliable source only. For instance, if you are writing a story about Donald Trump, you should name your picture as "Donald Trump" and use the same text in your headline. The size of your image is also significant. You should not use big images because they put a huge load on the server and might increase the loading speed. Thus, the best size of an image is 200 x 200px. An Alt text provides a brief description to your image and should be relevant to your article. Make sure you have removed the hyperlinks from your images before publishing your articles.

Image Format - JPEG, PNG, and GIF:

There are different types of picture formats such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Most of the bloggers and webmasters use JPEG as it's easy to load and gives better results than the other two image formats.

Wrapping Up:

Bloggers spend lots of time in writing quality articles, so they should not compromise on the quality of their pictures. Make sure you use fully optimized images for better search engine ranking.