Make Your Website Images Load Faster for Search
Engine Optimization
I recently had a conversation with a
Toronto Search Engine Optimization consultant, and he told me
that website loading speed has a small impact on the search engine
optimization of the website. As such, here's some ways you can
reduce the size of your images to make your website load fasters.
Images are the lifeblood of many websites in Toronto today
because of the easy way in which they augment text. While text is
certainly going to be the basis of your website, the old saying
about how a picture is worth a thousand words applies here because
not only can you use pictures to drive home the point of the text,
but you can also use pictures to optimize your website in a way that
the search engines absolutely love. However, while pictures are
great in this sense, you also need to be very wary about overusing
them to the point where people without broadband connections are not
going to be able to load your Toronto website in any comfortable way. There
are a number of things that you can do in order to achieve this and
the primary one is to make sure that your pictures load relatively
fast. Here are some ways to make that happen.
The Ratio Rule
If you are a person without a broadband connection in Toronto, then you would
probably like websites to be similar to the way newspapers are now.
There are some pictures for effect, but for the most part the text
is what you should really be getting at. Therefore, if you are
interested in imparting the same effect onto your website, then the
ratio rule should be something that you consider doing. The ratio
rule simply states that you need to find a balance between pictures
and words and the best way to find that balance is to actually come
up with a ratio. If your ratio was a thousand to one, then you would
only use one picture on your website per each thousand words that
appear on it. This is a good starting ratio for you to employ, but
as the world becomes more broadband you can probably decrease it to
a much smaller ratio due to the fact that people will be able to
load pictures faster.
Size Reduction
The biggest factor that is involved in how quickly an image loads is
of course the size of the actual file. A 1000 x 1000, 20 KB image
will load exactly twice as fast as a 500 x 500, 40 KB image despite
the fact that the first image is a lot larger. While size of the
picture and size of the file are certainly related in many ways,
different file types such as JPEG files are more efficient in the
way they store information than PNG files for example. Therefore,
what you want to do is use a mainstream and efficient file type like
a GIF or a JPEG and at the same time you also want to make sure that
your picture displays only what you absolutely need it to display
and does not have any extra space that might cause extra seconds for
it to load. Online users are generally very impatient and if a
picture takes 20 seconds to load, chances are they will have hit the
back button and moved on well before you get a chance to show them
the picture.
Use some of these tips from the Toronto search
engine optimization expert, and you should experience a
small bump in the rankings.
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