How to Make Images SEO Friendly

When implementing an effective SEO plan for your site it is important to know how to make images SEO friendly. Making your images SEO friendly will help improve the overall search optimization of your site.

This may sound difficult, but this handy guide will show you how to make images SEO friendly.

Where To Find Free Stock Images

There are many paid and free options available to you when searching for images for your site.

Flickr is the one of the largest sites to get images from. There are free options are available here, but be careful before you get attached to an image. A lot of the images require you to buy a license before you can use them or at least get permission from the owner.

Unsplash is a great resource for finding images for your site. The images come at no cost to you and doesn’t even require the creation of an account.

The site does encourage you to give credit to the photographer, but doesn’t require it.

Pexels is a lot like Unsplash, but just smaller. The images are free to use and also don’t require an account to start downloading.

Stockvault is a smaller version of Pexels. This may seem like it has very limited options. The upside to a small site with free images is that you are more likely to find images that less people are using. This makes your images unique in comparison to other sites.

For a couple more solid options, check out this article on where to find free stock images.

How To Make Images SEO Friendly

Image Size – In this case bigger is not better. Large images will need to be reduced in size when being imported to your site. In fact, most images only need to be a few hundred pixels in width and height.

If your exported image size is too big you’ll have to make it smaller for your site. This is a waste of time (not to mention a lot of larger images can affect your site’s performance), so it’s better to pick the right size before exporting.

On the other hand, if your image is too small when you upload it to your site you’ll have to make it bigger which will blur the image and make your image unusable.

If you take the correct steps to make your image in your photo editor the size it will be on your page, then you are effectively using it to SEO your images.

Image Quality – In Photoshop when you are saving your image, “save as” will give you the option to change the image quality.

When saving you will have the opportunity to use JPEG options which has a control slider to alter image quality between degrees.

1 is the most compression and 12 is the least compression, and both immediately show the file size and how the image is effected by the compression.

As long as the image doesn’t look too blurry, pixelated, or just plain bad, a lower quality image is the best option.

The exception to this is that a high quality image at a level 8 is a good average that makes the image look good and won’t need further compression.

Save For Web And Devices – One of the best ways of how to make images SEO friendly is using the “save for web and devices” option in Photoshop when exporting your image. 

Cell phone and laptop computer

Using this option compresses the image enough to shrink the file size without the quality of the image being affected and is a great way to use web based images.

This makes the image 33% smaller while not affecting the image quality.

There you have it! Learning how to make images SEO friendly is simple and will improve the overall search optimization of your site.

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