Optimizing Images for Google

Optimizing Images for Google
Optimizing images is an important part of optimizing your web pages. Content on web page is exceedingly important. Images are even more important. To make the web pages more appealing you need to take care of the images. However, images slow down the loading process of your pages. So how to make the web page more appealing without affecting the page load time? The answer lies in optimizing images for faster loading.

You may wonder the benefits of optimizing images. The benefits are aplenty. By taking care of the image size, you can increase the page crawl rate, make page load faster, decrease bounce rate, and finally, make the web pages more accessible. All this helps towards a better SEO.

There are many ways for optimizing images to suit your web page. Let us check out some of the easiest techniques.

Using Photoshop “Save for Web” Option

Photoshop has the option for optimizing images for web. Here, you need to click on the Save option after editing the image that you want to include on your webpage. Then select “Save for Web” option instead of the usual Save option.

Photoshop presents you with a window, wherein you can preview the image quality at different bit rates, different formats, and number of colors. Select the options that do not spoil the image quality and save the settings for future images.

Also remember that while optimizing images for the web, you can use a resolution of not more than 72dpi. Some web designers use 96dpi. This further reduces the image size without spoiling the quality of the image. The only thing is that you have to experiment a little in the Save for Web dialog for optimizing images to the best possible extent.

Using Simple Web based Tools
There are many web-based tools available in the web. Smush.it is a web-based tool that helps in optimizing images using your favorite browser. You can format plenty of images with non-glossy image optimization tools. It does not change the look or quality of the image but still helps in optimizing images by reducing the overall size and thereby reducing the loading speed for the image.

Among other features of the web-based tools are uploading images in bulk and downloading them in a zip folder. You can also upload images from the URL itself. Overall, optimizing images not only help in increasing the speed with which the page loads on a browser, but also helps in indexing your images for Google image search if you do not forget to use captions for each image. Image optimizing for indexing is best achieved in Adobe Photoshop.

Author: Sone Selva