Image Optimizing Process to make SEO Friendly Website

By admin

Optimizing your images is the best way to improve the download speed of your Web pages. A good rule of thumb is to strive for no one image being larger than 10 Kb. This is especially hard with animations, but if you can do it, you’ll have some great fast images.

After you optimize your images, you should call them in your HTML with the height and width specified in the image tag. This will allow the browser to continue rendering the Web page while the image downloads in the background.

1. Compress .jpg and .gif images: If you use photoshop, always use the “Save for Web” feature. If you don’t have access to PhotoShop, there’s a ton of free image compressing freeware out there.
2. Compress or eliminate unnecessary Flash elements: In my opinion, flash is over-rated and slow. It has it’s benefits, but make sure you don’t rely on it for navigation or other necessary site elements.
3. Don’t Resize Images within HTML: Don’t use the width or height attribute in the IMG tag to resize larger options. For example, if you resize an image that was originally 300 x 300 to 100 x 100, the user still has to download the full size one. Instead, use thumbnails.
4. Specify Image Dimensions: Don’t leave the width or height attributes blank. By doing so, you’ll slow down the browser rendering of the page, since it doesn’t know how much space to give for each image.
5. Slice Your Images: Slicing doesn’t actually reduce image size (in fact, it increases the overall size). However, it does increase the apparent load time by making each slice appear one at a time rather than one big image popping up after it downloads.
6. Avoid Too Many Slices: Don’t use too much of a good thing. As mentioned above, each slice actually increases the total size. I would recommend using no more than 4 slices, unless you are dealing with a huge image.