Search engines don’t only read the content that is published on your site, they also crawl through your file names and alt attributes. In this simple tutorial on how to optimize your photos for your website. We will go over how to resize for faster loading times and the importance of file names and alternate text. When you're done with the tutorial, be sure to download my free copy of How To Choose & Implement Photos For Your Website! Choosing photos for your website isn't as simple as picking out pretty pictures and graphics.
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Video Transcription
Hello, this is Sarah Conti from Design You Marketing and today I’m going to show you how to optimize your images for your WIX Website. The same rules apply across all website platforms, but today I will be showing you how to implement them in WIX. The three things we are going to talk about are the sizing of your photos, the file names, and your alternate text (also known as “alt text”) which allows Google to read what your photos actually are.
So, I’ve uploaded a couple of photos from UnSplash and they’re just sitting here in the template that I’ve opened. I’m going to click this little icon right here and go down to crop and edit. This will open up in the WIX Photo Studio and if you see right here - the photo right now is 2000 by 3000 pixels which is very very large. I'm going to display this pretty small on the website so I'm going to resize it. The reason we're making it smaller is because the images will load faster and it won't weigh down your page. If your website's pages are taking a long time to load it is not good for search engines or the visitor. I’m going to make it 300 pixels and if I click off it will fill in the height. Actually I’m going to make it a bit smaller and change it to 200 by 300 pixels. It says right here that it will auto-compress for the best viewing experience. So WIX compresses the images for you after you create the dimensions and save. It will save a copy separate from the original photo.
So, next I’m going to change the file name because obviously the file name that it has does nothing for me. I’m going to click in here and call it Sarah’s Coffee Shop Espresso with Foam. When I’m naming my photos I try to incorporate keywords in there because that will help visitors find you when they are typing into Google. You have to figure out what your customer would search for in Google to find your products. I’m just having this fake Sarah’s Coffee Shop for this tutorial. Okay, so I’m going to click that and click Add To Page. This is the size it displays on the template and so let’s say I decide to put it right here.
So, next up is you click on the image and click settings. It will pull up the image settings box and if you scroll down right here it is just going to throw whatever you named the image in there. You can erase that. You are basically telling Google what’s in the image and you want to incorporate keywords, but you don’t want to just list them. You want to be concise and tell people what’s in the picture because it is also for people that have screen readers that are not able to view the website. They will be able to know what is in the picture and help them with your products as well. So I’m going to call it Espresso In Cups with Foam Design and you can choose what you’re going to type here based on your keywords and what your intent is with your customers. WIX also has a tooltip field. The tooltip is what displays when you rollover your photo on the live site. You can copy the Alt text or you can use it to add another keyword.
If you’ve already put all the images on your website and want to check if they are optimized, you can click on them and go to settings and insert all the data. If you have background photos, which are unable to be dragged around like the photos that were placed on your site, you click on them and make sure it is highlighted. Then, click Change Strip Background even though you’re not going to change it and go to settings up here. If you click settings and scroll down to the bottom, here is where you can add your Alt Text and I would put Man Sipping Espresso at Sarah’s Coffee Shop. If you want to go through your site and make sure that all your photos have alternate text that will help you out immensely. The power of the images is that when people are searching for your services they use Google images as well and they’ll be indexed in Google images, but you have to tell Google and other search engines what they’re looking at. So, it can’t be NOTHING and it can’t be a file name that is IMAGE123, you have to name your images and put in the alternate text, and make sure you size appropriately for your site so your pages will load faster and you’ll be all set. Thank you for listening and if you have any questions you can go to my website www.DesignYouMarketing.com and I’ll be happy to answer them. Thank you!