Site Speed & Image Optimization
It seems that every year mobile gets a bigger slice of the internet usage pie. Therefore site speed becomes more crucial all the time. The quicker a website loads when a user is off wifi and on the go, the better the user experience. Just because an on the go user is off wifi, doesn't necessarily mean they will have patience for slow loading websites, right!?
Site speed is an important part of ranking because Google’s algorithm takes the loading speed of your landing page into play when delivering appropriate search result rankings.
Site speed is an incredibly important aspect in regard to SERP rankings, and thinking logistically, if you are on a business’ website, if it takes a while to load, how inclined are you to stay on the website, return to the website, or even make a purchase or any other conversion on the website? Probably not too likely. Google recognizes that and will even penalize your ranking ability if your site speed is slow.
Luckily, one of the most common things that slows a website’s speed is surprisingly an easy fix. The easy (potential) solution to increase your website’s loading speed is image optimization. Images are crucial to websites for a variety of reasons, mainly revolving around user experience and grabbing/maintaining user’s attention and focus.
While large, high resolution images look appealing (which they do), sometimes they are far too big for a website and could easily have their size minimized without sacrificing image quality.
For example, an image with dimensions of 3072 x 2048px on your homepage is probably unnecessarily large. Though it looks high quality and beautiful, you could most likely trim it down to 1536 x 1024px and it would appear the same on your website.
The only difference is that the file size is much smaller, which results in much faster loading times for your website. This then translates into your website ranking higher on SERPs!
There are a bunch of websites out there that allow you to simply paste a link of a website into it and it’ll give you that site’s loading duration and a grade for its speed (A-F).
This is a good indicator for you to determine where exactly your website stands and what improvements can be made on your website. Give WebPageTest.com or GTMetrix.com a shot if you want to see how your website performs (Psst! Look at that external linking!).
Image optimization isn’t solely about reducing the image file size, though. I mentioned this briefly near the very beginning of this post, but another way you can optimize your images to their full potential is by carefully naming your images and giving your images alternate text, commonly known as alt text or alt tags.
This tactic is incredibly easy and straight-forward and can have a big impact on your rankings. To implement this tactic, go to the backend of your website and find out which images are used where on your website. From there, name the file of the images by using keywords relevant to the page the image is on and of what the image is of.
Image Naming Example:
Pretend you still have the website that sells car parts used in the previous examples. On the homepage of the website, let’s say you have a picture of bumpers that your business offers. Instead of having the image be named something generic and standard like, “IMG_04382.jpeg”, change the file name into something like, “front_car_bumper.jpeg”.
Or, if you want to get even more specific, you could use your location, too. Say you run your business out of Boston, MA. Your Image could then be, “front_car_bumper_boston.jpeg. This would help generate more organic results for people in the Boston area searching for front bumpers, which would be a much higher quality source of traffic.
Alternate Text Naming:
Before diving into an example, let’s go over what alt text is exactly. Alt text is a description of what an image is, utilized by people who are visually impaired or that otherwise would have a tough time deciphering what an image is of. It is also used to tell the search engine what the image is of.
Now that you know what alt text is, similarly to an SEO title or meta description where you describe what it is on the page, you’ll want to describe what the image is of in the alt text while utilizing as many relevant & effective keywords as possible. Google reads the file names and the alt text when generating SERPs, so following this practice should help increase your site’s organic traffic.