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How to optimize website images from a SEO perspective.

Product images, screenshots, your beautiful team members, catchy images for your website content, corporate images, logos, icons, you name it – all your online images should join forces and work for your website success, rigorously planning to embrace the new era of universal search.

If you want to get the most out your images though, just sitting and watching how pretty they are won’t help you too much. You need to optimize your images to get faster loading times and attract more traffic to your website. You can do that by paying your highest respects to search engines rules. This article presents most common techniques of optimizing images for image search engines like Google Images, Yahoo Images or Live.

After so much work you’ve done redesigning your website, adding all those cool features and getting rid of all annoying bugs, it would be a pity to ruin everything because you forget the small but essential details.

You cannot afford to lose page rank, valuable links or loyal visitors, in a word, you should not lose more than you win with the new version of the website.

If you’re reading this, I know that you are in a hurry, because deadline is probably pretty short ahead of you, so make sure you go through this checklist before the commit of the new website:

1. No broken links, no 404 errors

Let XENU be your best friend today. Download it, install it, just enter the URL of your site and let Xenu do his job (it’s free). Fix all the 404 errors, do as many 301 redirects as you need to, and then do the checking again and again, until Xenu says it’s ok :). Also, the mod rewrite should be made in a user friendly manner, so as to generate readable URLs. Just to make sure, don’t forget to create a user friendly customized 404 page.

I was doing some research a few days ago in order to update an old article about effectively choosing colors for websites posted on the Resources section on Avangate website. My goal was to aid web developers with useful instruments for choosing the colors that should best suite their business.

I thus came across a very useful tool, DeGraeve Color Generator that knows how to extract the palette of colors from various websites, just by providing an URL. Besides that, this instrument can be used to extract colors from photographs.

Lately, website usability is the favorite subject for a lot of people I talk to. They feel the need to improve their sites, to make them easier and more pleasant to use, to increase their conversion rates or just want to know more about what I do here at Avangate.

Knowing that getting on the road is the most difficult part, I thought I might share with you a list of 3 people that played the most important roles in my usability “education” so far, the gurus that should not be missed by usability apprentices and, in a few words, what I have learned from each of them.

Our aim is to sell software and not to socialize with family or friends, you probably think, so what good could a bunch of pretty pictures bring to business? Well, we think there is potential in images, especially in photos when it comes to better promoting your website.

So we’ve started by posting to Flickr photographs taken during our participation to different events. Then, we’ve used the Flickr widget on Avangate website.