Make the Most Out of The Photos on Your Website
Many people don’t think twice about photos on a website. They’re a given. They’re expected to be there and expected to evoke a certain type of emotion from the viewer. But what many business leaders don’t realize is that there is an opportunity to optimize the photos on your website for not only speed but location (lending to your company being found in local search more quickly.
How to Choose Photos for your site?
All the photos chosen for your site should follow your business’ brand standards. (Not sure what those are? Learn more about brand standards here.) Brand standards set the guidelines for the types of photos to be chosen and the why behind them. In following your brand standards, choose photos that evoke emotion. What kind of feeling does your ideal customer want in the end? Choose photos that display those feelings. In addition, you’ll want to make sure that you are ethically sourcing all your photos. A good place to start is Adobe Stock Images.
What to do with photos before uploading them to your website?
You’ve successfully chosen the photos you want to display on your site – can you just upload them and move on? Simply put, no. To make the most out of the photos on your website, you’ll want to do the following 2 things before they are even uploaded to you site:
- Compress Your Images
Compressing images is a vital step before uploading them because oftentimes photos are so large that fully loading them drags down the site and slows it up quite a bit (at times, it can also include display errors). In order to optimize your photos for your website, the first step is to send them through a site like Tiny PNG that compresses the photos for free.
- Geo-tag Your Images
After you have compressed your images, you’ll want to make sure that they are geo-tagged. Geo-tag puts a little bit of code on them that ties gps coordinates to them which associates the photos with your business’s address (improving your local SEO). You’ll want to take the compressed photo and run it through a site like GEO LMR. Here you will be able to add your own geo coordinates, keywords to the photos and even alt text. Ensure that you hit “write EXIF tags” first before you download the photo. After you have downloaded the file, it is now ready to be uploaded to your website.
Example of what the name should look like:
Full Business Name City State Zip Code Keywords Img000
What to do with Photos on your site once they are uploaded.
Once you have uploaded your photo to your website, ensure that your alt text is fully written and named appropriately. Be sure to only upload photos that you have a place for on your site. Adding unnecessary photos can make your site slower.
Photos can be one of the best ways to elicit feelings and emotions like nothing else can. Ensure your photos are optimized so the visitors on your website can get the most out of them!
