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Banner Size Impact On SEO
With the bulk of search traffic coming from mobile devices — and with people’s attention spans having shrunk to eight seconds — it is critical for websites to create a speedy, seamless, and pleasurable user experience.
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Image optimization is a critical piece of this jigsaw.
What benefits does image optimization provide to my consumers (and to my SEO)?
By reducing your site’s load time by a few seconds, you may lower your bounce rate and increase site retention.
It contributes to the improvement of website loading speed, which is a significant element in Google’s ranking algorithm.
It may assist you in increasing your keyword popularity. You may read more about it here.
It aids in reverse image search, which may be a significant value add if your firm is product-based.
Numerous gadgets and PCs include high-resolution displays, necessitating the usage of high-quality photographs.
What are the common banner sizes?
Web banners are available in a variety of sizes. The Interactive Advertising Bureau established banner ad sizes that are universally accepted across all advertising networks. The dimensions of banners are specified in pixels. A pixel is the smallest editable element of a digital picture. Changing the pixel size of a picture affects both the image’s quality and its size. A single inch has 96 pixels.
How is image optimization defined?
Image optimization is the process of lowering the file size of your photographs as much as possible without compromising on quality, in order to maintain fast page load times. Additionally, it is about image SEO. That is, obtaining a high ranking for your product and decorative photos on Google and other image search engines.
Image optimization refers to the process of ensuring that your photographs appear faultless on both desktop and mobile devices. And that they do not impair the functionality of the website.
Image optimization aims to produce high-quality photographs with the smallest possible file size. Three significant factors are at work here:
Dimensions of the picture file (JPEG vs. PNG vs. WEBP images)
Level of compression
Height and breadth of the image
By striking a balance between the three, you may lower the size of your images while improving your website’s speed.
We optimise photos for a variety of reasons.
Images account for the lion’s share of page size, which contributes to page load time. According to HTTP Archive data, unoptimized pictures account for around 75% of the overall weight of a website. This might have a detrimental effect on your website’s performance.
Image optimization contributes to the weight reduction of your homepage and is a fundamental element of effective ecommerce web design, resulting in the following benefits:
Increased website performance
Image optimization for the web and mobile exists to accelerate the loading of online pages. They improve customers’ browsing experience. If your page performance is delayed by only two seconds, your bounce rate might rise by 103 percent.
Page speed refers to how quickly your page’s content loads. It is often characterised as:
The time it takes for your page to load, or the time it takes to show the material on your website
The time it takes for your browser to get the first byte of information from your webserver in milliseconds.
Google has said that one of the indications utilised by its algorithm to rank sites is site speed. According to Moz’s research, Google may particularly evaluate time to first byte when determining page performance. A sluggish page requires search engines to scan fewer pages using their crawl budget, which might have a detrimental impact on your indexing.
Guidelines for basic image optimization
These are some general guidelines that anybody may apply to any sort of website (including WordPress), ensuring that you are not entirely dependent on your developers and designers.
1. Choosing the appropriate picture type: vector or raster?
Vector pictures are straightforward; they are made using lines, points, and polygons. Vector graphics work well for shapes, logos, icons, and flat pictures. When zoomed in, they exhibit almost little pixelation, making them ideal for high-resolution devices. Additionally, you may utilise a single picture file across numerous devices (as well as for responsive website design) without requiring additional versions.
On the other hand, raster images are pictures composed of rectangular grids, each of which contains several colour values (pixels). Raster graphics provide depth to the visual you want to express, enhancing its emotional and psychological appeal due to its realism. However, if not properly managed, they might significantly slow down your site’s loading performance! Additionally, you may need to save many file versions to guarantee compatibility across platforms and suitability for responsive designs.
2. Which image format to use — SVG, JPG, PNG, or GIF?
For vector images, SVG is the only and best alternative. Additionally, you benefit from high-quality images that is readily scalable due to its flat imaging.
The best formats for raster images are as follows:
PNG:
Produces photos of exceptional quality but with large file sizes. It is only recommended for situations in which you want to preserve every aspect of the picture.
JPG:
Produces high-quality photos with a little file size. However, they are lossy photos, which means that you will permanently lose some tiny visual features. JPG is unquestionably the favoured picture format, since it enables hassle-free image downloading and uploading. As a result, they are the most extensively used picture format — around 72.3 percent of websites utilise JPG images, and the majority of smartphones store photographs as “.JPG” files. They are particularly recommended for ecommerce businesses and social networking platforms.
Gif:
If you want animation, GIF is an excellent solution since it offers 256 distinct colours drawn from the 24-bit RGB colour palette. Currently, just 26.6 percent of websites utilise GIF files.
Image naming – Best practises
Because search engines lack eyes, they will be unable to “read” your photographs or rank you appropriately unless you properly label them. This is where your keywords enter the picture. As I indicated before, by properly naming your photographs, you may increase your keyword density and ranking potential.
