Optimizing Images for SEO Purposes: A Guide
When choosing to optimize your images for SEO purposes, you’ll want to first identify the main reasons why you’ll want to optimize said images. Some of the most common reasons for doing so consist of: better user experience, faster loading times, higher rankings derived from faster site speed, reduced server latency, etc… For these reasons and more, it’s vital to have optimized images in today’s competitive SEO space. Read on to learn more about how optimizing your images can do wonders for your on-site SEO strategies!
A Better User Experience
User experience is one of the top factors in converting a potential user into an full-fledged customer. There are so many variables involved with user-experience, yet one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve the user-experience of your website is to optimize your images. This process involves speeding up loading times within your site’s pages and posts while also having beautiful, fully-rendered images which are not degraded in quality to the human eye. When this dynamic is achieved, there is a noticeable difference between a non-UX focused site and a site which is heavily focused on UX.
Faster Loading Times
As mentioned above, load times are crucial to both SEO and user-experience. If a site is consistently slow in its loading times, both search engine bots and users will find the experience to be unpleasant. For this reason, fast loading times should always be a priority of your site. Optimizing your images significantly improves your loading times and will help your site become a top-tier performer in its niche in terms of speed.
Higher Rankings Derived from Faster Site Speed
Search engines and their bots love fast-loading sites. When your images are optimized, you’ll already have a fast-loading site which will allow you to beat out the competition who potentially happens to have a slow-loading site. When this process is rinsed and repeated across your whole site, you can expect a significant, positive change in your rankings. As you accomplish more and more within your on-site SEO, you’ll begin to notice how the “little things” begin to add up to big improvements over time.
Reduced Server Latency
Server response time is something which can be dramatically improved when your images are optimized. Most pages and posts within a site are bogged down by image rendering. When your images are quick to load, this helps the servers supporting your site and reduces overall latency when browsing through your site as a whole. This process of reduced server latency will signal to search engines you care about your users, your servers, and the overall experience when users visit your site.
One of the Best Tools to Optimize Images
Our recommendation for one of the best, and easiest tools is TinyPNG. It’s a drag-and-drop optimizer which allows you to have excellently optimized images in a matter of seconds. You can even install their plugin to your WordPress site to have it optimize your images across your WHOLE site. It’s truly a life-saver and we cannot recommend their service enough!
Optimizing Your Images is the Right Choice
You may believe optimizing all of your images will be quite the burdensome task, but with the help of this brief guide, we hope you now understand the importance of image optimization and how it can truly help your overall SEO efforts. To learn more about how DASH-SEO can help your site’s SEO, feel free to submit your site using the form below and we’ll respond with a full-scale, complimentary SEO audit within 24 hours. We look forward to hearing from you soon!