How to Optimize Image for SEO

 Images and other visuals are an easier and better way to communicate with our website users. According to carmelon, 80% of people remember what they see while just 20% can vividly remember what they read. Also, they emphasize on the ability of the human brain to process images as little as milliseconds. When it comes to content creation images are very useful, but better when you optimize image for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Optimize Image for SEO : Advantages

1. Visual content creates higher connections

The human attention span is difficult to retain with text. There is a need for aids to help do this. It is where visual contents like images and infographics come to play. They help make and retain their connections. With the help of captivating visuals, the connection between users and your content becomes stronger.

2. Visuals are easily Memorable.

When it comes to memorizing content, visuals have a higher probability of been retained than images. Statics show that they improve learning at about 400 per cent higher than text content. A good example is the use of counters and flashcards in elementary schools.

Children and adults connect and retain information passed via visual aids better than written text.

3. Content breaks 

People get tired of reading long written content. Visuals are an excellent way to break your content while retaining the attention of your audience.

4. Increase organic visibility

Google and other search engines are improving the way their platform works. Searches are based on human interaction and more dynamic than it used to be. As such, we as marketers should give more consideration to our content that are been presented.

Visuals are one of those ways that will improve users interest in our content thus improve our visibility on search engines

5. Drive more leads : 

When it comes to driving more traffic, you will find visual content useful. More traffic result’s in more leads; invariably, more quality images will result in quality leads.

In achieving it, you need to merge image creation with brand consistency. Consistency in fonts, colours, text fonts and other image characteristics will boost your brand visibility and increase your authority.

We have identified the advantages of using images in our content creation process. Although these images are of advantageous, they can also impact our website negatively. They contribute to your webpage’s size. Thus, they can reduce the speed of your website, thus making your website slow. Apart from videos, they are the next item that can increase your website size.

To avoid it, you must optimize your images.

What is Image Optimization?

Image optimization is the process of presenting our images in the smallest size that is achievable without affecting its quality in any way. There are various ways of achieving this, thus making the process easily achievable than it sounds. Some plugins can effectively handle image optimization, reducing the size as much as 80% of the original size without impacting the image quality.

The benefit of image optimization includes:

1. Higher conversion for sales and leads
2. Improvement in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and ranking.
3. Improved website speed
4. Backups of the website become faster
5. Increase available storage space

From the above, a website with well-optimized images will be faster. Speed is one of those factors that contribute to ranking. Search engines like Google give website speed high priority. Let us start taking a look at how to optimize an image.

When it comes to image optimization, we will focus on your file format and its size. When we talk about your file format, it refers to the type of your file. There are three common file types for images. They are:

1. Jpeg
2. PNG
3. Gif

The file size refers to the dimensions of the height or the width. It is measured in pixels. If you diligently combine this two with the right compression, you can reduce your file size to about 80%. It will not alter the quality of your file. I will explain file format and size in details.

How to Optimize Images

1. Image Dimensions

If you are downloading files to use, they normally come out with large file sizes. In some cases, your files could come out with file size as high as 1500 pixels. It is not a good file size for websites, they could do well on printed materials but when it comes to your website, they will slow it down and reduce your search engine ranking.

To make these files suitable for your website, you need to reduce the file size. There is software that can help you achieve this reduced image size. GIMP and Irfanview are two free tools that I use to achieve this.

How to use GIMP for Image adjustment 

Like I said above, GIMP is a free tool that you can use for image adjustment. The first thing is to download this free tool from Google. To achieve size reduction without affecting the quality, go to your file menu and click on the open menu to select the pages

Now you can select the image you want to resize and go to images, then select scale images

After selecting scale images, you can change the dimensions. Select your quality and change it to Sinc and then click on the scale image button as shown below

2) Select Image File Type 

When it comes to image file type, three basic file types are used – t

Jpeg, GIF, and PNG. Understand where and when to use each file type as this also affect the size of your files.

GIFs stand in a class of its own, they are widely used for animated photos, while JPEG is used for images with multiple colours, the find used for direct pictures and download. PNG is for a light image with low colour output; they find use in screenshots.

3. Image Compression 

Image compression is another vital part of image optimization. It comprises of different stages, and each set varies from another. But the good thing here is most free image editing tools like GIMP comes with image compression. Of a truth, this form of compression is not always precise and excellent.

To achieve excellent compression, you should take advantage of paid tools like TinyPNG and JPEGmini. These are manual ways of achieving image compression. But some plugins can help with auto compression of images.

But the best way to achieve excellent optimization is compressing your images before uploading them.

In conclusion, optimizing your images before uploading them is of high advantage to your website. If you are not doing it, it is time you start doing it. You might feel it is difficult, but gradually you will get used to it.

Apart from it helping your website in terms of speed, it will impact positively on your search engine ranking. Apart from image optimization, another important thing that you will help your website speed is using a WordPress caching plugin and a WordPress CDN.

But if you use a WordPress managed hosting company, you got your back covered, such hosting you will get at the wealthy affiliate platform’ SiteRubix.