Optimizing Web Page Pictures

Pictures play a vital role in many websites’ success. Good quality and relevant pictures will increase the success of many websites. However, I see far too many beginners who misuse images on their site.

Here are 2 common mistakes I see with respect to website images:

1. Make sure the alt tag is relevant and descriptive to the picture. In other words, don’t use keywords in the alt tag which may be relevant to the page but are not descriptive of the specific picture.
2. All photos should be optimized with a program like PhotoShop Elements. I have 2 pictures below to describe what I mean by “optimizing photos”.

This photo began as a very high resolution picture taken with my digital camera. I simply resized it with Photoshop without optimizing it. Right mouse button on the picture and click “properties” in order to see its size. Notice that it is 160k in file size. (This is far too big of file size.)

This is the same exact photo as above. However, it has been optimized with PhotoShop. Right click on it and notice its file size is only 17k. It's only about 1/10th the size! Notice that the quality is almost exactly the same in each photo.

How To Optimize In Photoshop:

Good SEO requires that the total page size, pictures plus text, is as small as possible. Google takes away “points” when they analyze a page that has a too large of file size. It’s best to keep the total size under 100,000k. Less is better.

I even see some people using the full size picture on their page and instead of resizing it correctly with a program like PhotoShop, they simply resize it in their HTML. Do not do this! I’ve seen some people using pictures on their pages which are 100’s of k in size. Not only will the file size be GIGANTIC, the quality of the photo is affected. Always use a program like PhotoShop to resize photos.

Click Below To Try PhotoShop Elements: