What is image optimization?

[tisarvind]

Hi,

Please some one tell me in detail that what is image optimization and what are its importance in SEO.

[thefandango]

Optimising image names can get your image found more easily in google image search.

[succeedemail]

The importance to SEO is that it's another way to help get your website found in the search engines and associated with your niche and relevant topics.

[tisarvind]

Originally Posted by thefandango

Optimising image names can get your image found more easily in google image search.

Hi,

Thanks for your informative answer.

Regards,

[tisarvind]

Originally Posted by Pintu

Manual image optimization is an easy process and not something that you should have to go out of your way to do. First of all, you should be tinkering with all your images in Adobe Photoshop. Other programs, despite promise, are not on the same level as Photoshop. After you have manipulated your image to the correct appearance and canvas size for the job, you need to use the “Save for Web” command from the file menu. This will allow you exercise fine-grained control over the image and its file size.

The first thing to do is select a format for the job. A rule of thumb, If your image is similar to a photograph, you should be using a .jpg format. If your image is more similar to a graphic, you should be using a .gif or .png format. Many sites have jpegs when they should be using gifs or pngs. When in doubt, trust your eyes and toggle back and forth between jpg and gif. Make sure you look for distortion around sharp edges in .jpgs as a sign of poor quality.

Hi,

Thanks for providing us so useful information regarding image optimization.

Regards,

[Innomax]

Image optimization in my opinion is:
- To have proper image formats (gif/jpg).
- To have light weight for ease of downloading.
- To use proper alt tags with them.

[williamc]

Originally Posted by tisarvind

Hi,

Thanks for providing us so useful information regarding image optimization.

Regards,

Don't thank the thief. He/She stole the post. Almost every post Pintu has made is stolen.

"Manual image optimization is an easy process and not something that you should have to go out of your way" - Google Search

[Janna122003]

Image optimization can help your image rank with your targeted keywords which means additional traffic.

[jimmy03]

Like website optimization, there is image optimization also, which means different ways through which you can optimize your images in your website, so that they rank well when a visitor searches for images on Search Engine...

[micheljaw]

Image optimization is significant to search engine optimization. It is the process of making graphic arts ready for a website. Image optimization services as part of SEO Process. Image optimization consist of strategies to make your graphics search engine friendly. This includes optimize your image file for maximum speed, editing, sharpened, condensed and cropped for quality.

[williamc]

Originally Posted by micheljaw

Image optimization is significant to search engine optimization. It is the process of making graphic arts ready for a website. Image optimization services as part of SEO Process. Image optimization consist of strategies to make your graphics search engine friendly. This includes optimize your image file for maximum speed, editing, sharpened, condensed and cropped for quality.

Stolen or reposted from seo image optimization - Webmaster Forum - Web Design and Development - SEO - Freelance

[Jermooski]

Hello...

Optimizing images can really speed up a page load, decrease the overall page size, and decrease the bandwidth used. When images such as .gif are saved, by default they may use the the entire web color pallet of 255 colors. This means... the gif on your website has all the information for 255 colors. The image may be 12k in size. If the image only uses 60 colors... then the optimization may bring the file size down to 3k, but the image still looks the same. Nothing is lost because the other colors were never being used.

So if your page has 100 images at 12k, thats 1.2mb download, as compared to 300k total download. Then multiply that by the # of visitors and you will be off to the races!

My math sux by the way, so add salt.

jer

[weegillis]

From the above we can see there are two chief considerations, both having to do with optimization, but mutually independent and skewing the meaning of "optimize" from one way to another in the process.

SEO seeks to place the best terms within the appropriate text fields and have a document rank in the first page of the SERPs for those terms.

Hardware and network constraints dictate that pages (the aggregate of source, css, js, gif, jpg, png, etc.) need to be kept as small as possible, usually in the range of 32 to 64 KB, to be network and user friendly in slow connection speed scenarios.

The general consideration is overall size of the download, followed by the number of objects in the download for a first time user. Repeat visitors will often have a lot of 'permanent' items cached when they return. Only those objects that have changed since their last visit would need to download. But let's stick to the first time visitor for the sake of this discussion so we see the whole bundle.

Say your document consists of an html page, skin graphics and header graphic, a couple of css files, a couple of scripts, and a dozen images that may be photos or badges as apply. That makes roughly 20-25 items that will need to be requested after the initial html page is parsed into the array.

Each request has to go through the same motions, and usually involves some talk back and forth between the client and server. All of this takes time, which is commonly referred to as LATENCY. It expands quickly over a congested network or a busy web server. Then there is the actual time needed to transmit the individual files.

Now let's say on the page in question, 6 of the pictures are in the 48 KB range. On a 56 kbps connection, they would need at least six seconds each to download, plus the latency factor putting the whole download in the 40-45 ball park. And that's just those pictures.

Latency is not a factor that can be given a number as it can range from a couple of milliseconds per packet to several hundred. If it runs to 30 seconds the connection is usually timed out as it has been lost. Allowing roughly 1 second for every 5 items, gives us about 5 seconds in this example.

Adding about 24 K for the skin, 20 K for the html, 20 K for css and script, and say 12 K worth of badges gives us a nice round page of about 350 KB. Whoa! Did I say 350? Yup, that's how fast it can add up. Some poor soul is sitting in the back country with poor phone lines and 48k worth of bandwidth potential waiting a minute for the page to complete downloading. Then it has to run the scripts.

It's easy to see from an example like this how things can get way out of hand if we don't consider slow connections when we're composing our pages. Fortunately, SEO plays a big hand in smoothing this out: Short, succinct pages with few if any unrelated objects, and that put the emphasis on text, not images. In other words, split it between three pages, rather than place it all in one.

The first page to come in will be lighter weight, even with skin graphics, css and scripts. The second and subsequent pages will only need their html and unique images so they will stream in quickly. Your visitor gets to all the content in way less time overall.

And what images are used are 'optimized for the web' by being kept as small as possible. A photo can be reduced to 12-16 KB if it is kept under 300 pixels to a side. Skin graphics need to be screwed right down so they take up no space at all. With CSS, your job is easier because of borders, and such.

[marketraisecorp]

Search Engine bots can see and read only texts.They cannot identify images.Hence optimizing the images is very important as far as SEO is concerned.Images must be described with relevant text that includes your top keywords.This is useful if at times due to some problem if the image could not be loaded ,then the alternate text could tell us what the image describes.
Care should be taken so that the same text should not be used for two or more images on the same page.

[Terry Van Horne]

Image optimization... useless... the only people who make money off it are those selling images and image optimization services, and search engines who just use it as another place to put up their billboards.

IMO, Images associates to nothing, add zero relevance to a page since "alt" tags are pretty much ignored by all engines and often optimization just results in more images being stolen from you. Think about why people search for images. People who are looking to add them to their pages. I sometimes wonder if SEOs think or just do one cookie cutter thing after another because some WoDS says they should while filling space on a slow news day! I could care less if I'm #1 in image search does zilch for the bottom line.

[samlko]

Image Optimization: This term is used to describe the process of image slicing and resolution reduction. This is done to make file sizes smaller so images will load faster.

[shakir]

Originally Posted by Innomax

Image optimization in my opinion is:
- To have proper image formats (gif/jpg).
- To have light weight for ease of downloading.
- To use proper alt tags with them.

I thing U r correct for optimization.. but asking in terms of SEO

[zeruel]

Some SEO or Webmasters doesn't like the traffic coming out of the image search results, some just consume bandwidth and doesn't really give the site good conversion and quality traffic.

[kevsta]

image optimization is the process of driving traffic to a site via image search, which is voluminous these days, but as Terry says it is mostly fairly useless traffic.

we've been experimenting at length with it for a while now, tests indicate that image size and speed of loading are fairly unimportant in rankings.

You need to include alt text, but images can also rank from almost any words on the page, the closer to the image, the more likely those words will be come ranking kws for the image. and they definitely rank from kw hits in the page titles and URL too.

the main ranking factor apart from that seems to be the strength of the page itself, and anchor text links aimed at the page will improve the image's rankings