Improve SEO and speed up your website. Photographers, bloggers and businesses use my photo editing services to promote themselves. They use the edited photos to promote their business online. Many of my photo retouching clients choose me to fix their photos. I offer a personal service, and I am always happy to pass on advice to them.
I am quite often asked for advice on website issues. Such as why is their website so slow to load, and what is the best way to get a product or service visible online. I am not a website developer. But as a professional photo editor, it is my job to prepare the final edited photos for my clients needs.
As I have said before; photos edited for a print brochure are larger. For a website or an online marketing campaign, they need to be much smaller.
Improve SEO with optimised images
The most important factor when preparing images for websites, is the image size. Many of my clients have uploaded huge print sized images for their blog or website. These pages take forever to load. Did you know that you can lose up to 60% of potential customers if a website is slow to load.
The first thing I suggest is that they send all the photos that they are going to use for their blog or website.
Even if they appear to be final retouched photos, I edit the images by optimising them for the web. This is not an expensive or time consuming process. If you want to learn more about doing this type of photo editing yourself, you can check out my blog. Here is an article about optimising images for the web. using an application like photoshop or using an online app.
Once the photos are resized, the next step to upload them to your website. Something you need to bear in mind. There is a difference between optimising an image for website loading speed, and making sure you get the most out of SEO (Search engine optimisation) for your website.
Many of my photo editing clients do not realise that if you upload an optimised image to a website. Without optimising the name of the photo, they have lost a free and easy way to improve SEO for the website. Google indexes everything, even photos. So if you upload a bunch of product or services images to your website named”897.jpg”. Even if they are retouched, nobody will find them.
Images that appear with a google search
Rename images to reflect your product or service. For example if you sell phone accessories. It would be great to rename the photos to “Mike’s phone shop.jpg” and variants of that. To prove this point, do a google search for phone accessories, and click on the images link. You will see tons of optimised photos. Many people have actually found the website through the optimised photo.
Most websites these days are built on WordPress. This makes it even easier to improve SEO, using some really great plugins.
If you do not have the time to download rename and resize all your images. There are some great WordPress plugins to consider. I will go through a few of these plugins that can help to improve SEO:
Optimole
Optimole is a plugin that takes your images from your website and optimises them . It picks the right image size for the visitor’s browser.
Another great feature is it uses lazy loading to display the images. This basically means if you have a lot of photos on one page, the images will only load when you scroll to it. This speeds up the load time of a website and can improve SEO.
Media File Renamer
This plugin automatically renames your media filenames depending on their titles. Renamed files, the references to it are also updated (posts, pages, custom types and their metadata). This will improve your SEO.
There are numerous plugins for wordpress websites. Including image optimisation and renaming images. I have only mentioned two of thousands of plugins that are available for optimising WordPress websites. I know that I have digressed a bit from my photo editing services blog articles. But what I have realised over time. If you are aware of the reasons you do your work, how it benefits the client, you will get more enquiries.
Improve SEO and speed up your website
This knowledge has helped me build up a client base who regularly send me photo editing projects for specific purposes. I will be posting further articles on how to optimise a website to improve sales.
