What Is Image Optimization & How To Optimize Images For Your Website?

Digital marketing is one of the serious businesses in the market. Still many of top SEO’s doesn’t have a clear view on image optimization and its importance.

It is important for an SEO to excel in all parts of the digital marketing. But many don’t notice the importance of Image optimization in the SEO. Google has announced, “speed is one of their ranking factors”.

Thus it is important for SEO’s and marketers to know about image optimization. Here I have provided you some basic image optimization techniques and examples.

What Is Image Optimization?

Image optimization is the process of reducing the size of the image files without affecting the quality of the images. It starts with choosing the format of images and ends with compressing the images for the website.

Optimizing images in a webpage will reduce the size of the page which will increase the speed of the site. Image optimization also provides an excellent experience to the users and will result in an increase in revenue.

Types Of Images:
Vector Graphics:

The vector graphics are generated mathematically using points, curves and lines.

Eg: Svg

Pros:

Vector images can be used in any resolution. They provide you the freedom to compress your image to any size with lots of details.
Easy to edit and small in size because vector images are composed of programmatic instruction.
Vector graphics can be easily converted to raster graphics where there will be no or minimal change in size.
Cons:

When a file is converted from raster graphics to vector graphics, the image cannot be easily edited and it will lose details when compressed.

Raster Graphics:

In raster graphics, the images are made by pixels (rectangular grid pixels).

Eg: png, jpeg, gif

The raster images are universally accepted but high optimization required to reduce to apt size. Let’s discuss raster images.

Gif:

The Gifs are mostly used for animation purposes. They are still being used for text and flat colors. Their main advantages are they support transparency and small in size.

Note: Gifs only support 256 color palette.

JPEG:

The JPEG is one of the most used formats and it is still used for more than 70% on the web. They are mainly used for large images and gradients of different colors. Its main disadvantage is that it doesn’t support transparency.

PNG:

The PNG is one of the best image formats in recent times and acts as a replacement for both JPEG and Gif. The 8 bit PNG acts as a replacement for GIF while 32 & 64 bit acts as a replacement for JPEG format.

WebP:

The WebP format provides a 25% reduction in size and helps to increase the speed of the site. But WebP format is only supported by chrome so it’s not possible to use it in full fledge.

Reason For Image Optimization:

The demand for fast pages is one of the main reasons for Image Optimization.
Google officially confirmed that the site speed is one of the ranking factors.
People don’t want to wait more than 5s for a page to load.
How To Optimize Your Images?
Scaling Images:

In the modern world, Images produced by mobiles phones are far larger than before. A typical image from iPhone ranges up to 7360*4912 and weighs up to 30 Mb. Thus, resizing images is one of the essential part optimizations of the images.

There are lots of software in the market both paid like Pixelmator, Irfanview and unpaid like a paint can help you scale your images.

Important Points To Remember While Scaling:

Always use a copy of the original image to scaling.
Always maintain original image aspect ratio without optical distortion
Some important facts in Image Cropping:
File size of the image will be naturally reduced by trimming.
Use the quality cropping tool to best result.
Retina Display:

The retina display is nothing but too many pixels packed close to each other and it is used in Apple products. PPI (pixels per inch) may vary based on the display.

Display Aperture Ratio:

The display aperture is nothing but the distance between the pixel and transparent area. When the display aperture ratio is low that affects the quality of the image. The smaller the ratio less light passes through it and affects the display.

Capacitive Coupling:

When pixels are close to each other then, there is a chance of signal jumping from one artifact to another causing interference. Apple uses SHA (super high aperture) to prevent capacitive coupling.

Compression:

The image compression is the process of eliminating data from the image which can’t be seen by human eyes. The raster format images need compression to reduce its file size. It is important to optimize the JPEG format because of its file size.

You can make use of tools like Imageoptim or Trimage for compression of your images.

Note: There can be unwanted visual changes after compression which has to be checked properly after compression.

Optimizing Image For SEO:

Using a meaningful file name with your focus keyword help you in your SEO.

Using the alt tag will help you in SEO point of view. Don’t use Spammy words in the image alt text.

Speed Test: The speed test helps you to know more about your site’s performance. Image optimization will help you to improve your site speed.

Process In Image Optimization:

Format: Selection apt image format is the first process in the optimization.

Cropping: You have to crop and resize images to get the best visual impact with low file size.

Note: Don’t use the original image for resizing and cropping.

Variants: Create images for both normal as well as a retina display.

Image Compression: Make use of image compression especially, when you’re using JPEG format.

SEO: Optimize your image file size and alt text to improve SEO performance.

CDN: The content delivery network helps you to deliver your media files when needed. Think about using it.

Thus, I hope now you know a little bit about image optimization that you can utilize it on your website. If you want to know more about digital marketing and related blogs then check out our site.

I hope you have a good day.

Bye.

#digitalmarketing #image #optimization #Imageformat #imagecompression