How to make the best out of pictures

There are plenty of software tools which will help you to create stunning, eye-catching headers, graphics and banners. They will help you get your visitors’ attention and make your web page content look more attractive. Let’s take a look at some tips about using images in your web site:

Make sure the image content is relevant to its name. If you take a picture of your car for example and you want to upload it to your blog, then be sure to rename it accordingly like brand-model.jpg for example. Why do so? When search engines crawl your web site they index not only the text but the images as well. More importantly this will have a positive SEO effect on the page you use this image on. Plus if you want your graphics to appear in the Google Images search results and drive more traffic to your web site then you shouldn’t upload a photo with the name IMG125462.jpg.

Include the “alt” tag. This tag’s purpose is to describe the image’s content and is really important for search engines. How to use the tag:

alt=”” – empty, this is bad

alt=”car” – not great, but has some effect

alt=”my new car brand model year” – great job!

alt=”my car, my new car, my awesome car” – very bad, spammed too much, avoid it at all costs!

Keep good pictures to text ratio. Unless we are talking about infographic no visitor wants to come to a website with tons of images and just 2-3 rows of text. Images’ purpose is to attract, or make call-to-action if talking about image buttons but not to replace the whole text content. People visit web sites to find more information about something and they prefer to read text than to feel bombarded with flashy banners, ads and anything that can distract them.

Use high-quality pictures and optimize them to load quickly. People love to see professionally-made banners, photos and logos. Be sure to use them with appropriate for the website size and dimensions. For instance – if the picture’s dimensions are more than 1000×1000 pixels and for the web page’s needs the size shouldn’t be larger than 300×300 you should resize the image to make it look better on the website. If you are using WordPress the editor will do this for you and also reduce the file size (less KB) and your images will load faster. After all you have 20 seconds to impress a visitor so make sure that everything loads in time. Otherwise if the page is not loaded the user will simply close it.