Why Should You Optimize Images before Putting them on Your Website

If you own and run an e-commerce website, you should get in touch with a search engine optimization specialist that pays attention to optimizing the images on your website. Images are an important part of any website and more so for e-commerce websites. Many e-commerce website owners believe they have to optimize the images of their products to get users’ attention. While this is part of the objective, there is much more than you can achieve with optimized images. These images directly impact your website’s SEO. Here is how you benefit from image optimization in many different ways.

You Get Users’ Attention
A part of the optimization process is to keep only high-quality images on your website. Of course, these high-quality images are valuable for website visitors. When they are looking for a particular product, they want to have a closer look at it. You can’t get their attention with un-optimized and low-quality images. Zooming in will result in pixelated pictures, and this can be greatly off-putting for your customers. In simple words, using high-quality images on your website can have a direct contribution to your sales.
You Get Ranked High
The main purpose of search engine optimization is to rank your website higher in search engine results. If you did not know already, images are not recognized by search engine crawlers. For you to make crawlers know the existence of images on your website, you have to send signals. These signals can be sent in many different forms. First, name your image files according to what the image contains. If the image is a smartphone back cover, use smartphone back cover as the keyword in the file’s name. Furthermore, use alt tags to serve as alternatives for your images.
Search engine crawlers also recognize the alt tags with your images. If you are uploading multiple pictures of the same product, use alt tags wisely. For example, if you have named one of the alt tags as “Red Ferrari Interior,” name the next one “Red Ferrari Exterior” if it shows the exterior.
Your Page Loading Time Reduces
Page loading times play a huge role in a website’s success or failure today. Several marketing statistics have shown that visitors move on to a new website if yours takes more than a couple of seconds to load. Large sized images can be the culprit behind your website’s long loading times. A part of image optimization process is to make your website compressed to reduce their sizes. However, the images must maintain their quality even when they have been compressed.
You Become Mobile Friendly
It is not all about desktop devices in today’s world anymore. Whenever you make changes to your website, start a new one or renovate an existing one, you have to keep mobile in mind. For your website to be viewable on mobile devices, you have to optimize the images as well as the entire website for them. This ensures that your images appear according to the size of the screen that a user is viewing your website on.
There are many ways for you to optimize the images on your website in addition to reducing their sizes and compressing them. One thing that many professional search engine optimization companies would do is strip your pictures of meta-data when they are delivered to the users’ devices. When this data remains associated with the images, it takes longer for users to download them and hence delayed page loading times. Get in touch with an experienced SEO company and have your images optimized to help your website rank higher.