Look at any website that really catches your eyes and you will see one thing in common. Many beautiful and engaging images. Images can single-handedly bring your site to life while attracting a visitors immediate attention. While it is essential for a website to contain images it is also important to understand how to properly add images to your website.
Before you even upload the image you will want to do some prepping. Using a program like Photoshop you can make sure your image is the right size, color, brightness, etc. In addition it is vital that you check the image size. Keep in mind that many images have an original file size that is over 1000(width) x 1000 (height) which is great particularly when you want to print the image but for the web most images can be uploaded at about 800×800. Sizes will vary depending on the layout of the image but you can always crop an image prior to upload to get the exact dimension you would like.
Once the image is prepped and ready to upload the next important thing to consider is the name of the file. Giving your image a relevant file name will give you some SEO benefits. For example, if your website is about marbles and you upload an image of kids playing with marbles a good image name would be kids-playing-marbles.jpg as opposed to 549xd546.jpg. Not only will this help you organize and recognize your image file but it also has a potentially important keyword “marbles” in the name. The other thing to consider is once you upload the image to make sure you fill out the alt tag. This is important because it provides Google bots with the text description of your image and it will also display to your visitors in the case the image does not load.
