We’ve already established that well-written content on your website is the key to SEO success but sometimes it takes more than that to draw your audience in and entice them to stay. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. On your website this is especially true because that picture could turn a casual lurker into a lifelong member.

Adding images to your website is essential because it helps you communicate to your audience more effectively. Some people are very visual and so when they get hit with a wall of words, it can be overwhelming. That is why the use of imagery is one of the most powerful tools used in marketing today.

However, while images are powerful and essential, they can’t be effective if they aren’t displayed correctly on your website. Listed below are the top 5 image formatting mistakes to avoid:

1. Uploaded images are not optimized for web

Uploading images that are not optimized for the web can be an issue that slows down your website and increases load time. This happens because the file size of the image used is simply too large.

Helpful Tip:  If you have an image editing tool such as Photoshop, you will be able to optimize your images for the web easily.

2. Uploaded image is not displaying correctly

If you upload an image to your website and it looks blurry, then that can mean one of two things:

• The resolution for the image is incorrect: You will want to make sure that you have an image resolution of 72 ppi to 120 ppi. Unlike print design, you can get away with a much lower resolution for the web.

• The original image was small and re-sized larger. Many times, when you take a smaller image and make it bigger, it doesn’t always work out as the resolution for the original image was low and the image itself is not in a vector format. That means, when you size it up, it takes the ppi resolution that it has and stretches the pixels thereby making the picture blurry.

Helpful Tip: For the sake of image quality, it is much better to reduce the size of a large image and place it on your website than to take a smaller image and increase it in size.

3. The image looks disproportionate

You found the perfect image for your website but it is portrait and you need a landscape image. So, you decide to re-size the image so that it is wider instead of taller. When you upload it on your site, you notice that it looks odd.

Helpful Tip: Before you look for an image for your website, be sure to decide whether you want it to be in portrait format or landscape format. If you find a very large image you can sometimes crop it to the desired format (depending on the image), but I have found that it is easier to know which format you need before you find the image, that way you don’t have to deal with that hassle later on.

SEO Tip for Images: Don’t forget to give your images alt tags with descriptions when you upload them. Not only does this make your images more accessible for handicap users, it also adds to your website search engine optimization and helps your site rank higher in searches!