Optimize your images
Media in the form of images, videos, infographics, and GIFs has become one of the most important parts of building a website. Images bring color to the site, make content more vivid, attract readers’ attention, and trigger emotion.
Why do I need images on my website?
It’s not a myth: images help your website’s SEO. They provide perspective to long-form content and improve readability, while screenshots and graphs build credibility. Most visitors want to visualize what you’re describing — if you describe a product or service extensively, include images of it, the process behind it, or the team delivering it.
How do I pick images?
The natural instinct is to reach for the highest-resolution images available. Resist it: huge files increase load time, bounce rate climbs, and Google grades your site low on user experience. Choose images that are relevant to the content — the more relevant, the better the page ranks.
Use as many original images as possible. Generic sites buy stock photos; your brand stands out with real-life images of your team and your work. If you can’t shoot your own, use free repositories like Unsplash, Freepik, or Pixabay, and give credit where the platform requires it. GIFs are fine too, as long as the media matches the tone of your content.
Basic pointers while optimizing images
- Pay close attention to ALT tags — the descriptive phrase that shows when an image can’t be displayed and that tells crawlers what the image is. Include focus keywords, including location names.
- Name files meaningfully. Put focus keywords toward the beginning, include location keywords where natural, and drop stop words like a, an, the.
- Compress and scale images, and make sure they stay responsive on mobile devices.
- Caption images with useful, non-repetitive detail; location details in captions add local relevance for both visitors and crawlers.
- Include image information in your XML sitemap, or create a separate image sitemap.
- Mind proportions and alignment. If the technicalities are right but the page looks bad, users bounce anyway.