SeoAlchemist

Images are a great way to make your content more engaging and interactive. Unfortunately, in an effort to make your pages more appealing, webmasters often forget about the size of the images and the page load time. Taking care of the image size, you:

• Increase your page crawl rate;
• Make your pages load faster and thus decrease the bounce rate;
• Make your pages more accessible.

Here are a couple of simple tips to optimize your images without (almost) any loss of quality:

1. Photoshop "Save for web" option:

I am no Photoshop professional, I only use its most basic features to beautify my screenshots but I love this option: image optimization for web. After you are done with editing your image, just:

• Click "Save" and then select "Save for web" (or use "CTRL+Alt+Shift+S" shortcut);
• Choose the image quality (based on the image size you want to achieve) - mind that the image quality is satisfying while you are adjusting the size.

2. Use Simple Web-Based Tools

Smush.it is a web based tool (as well as a FireFox addon) that optimizes images right within your favorite browser:

It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality.

Its best features include:

• Upload images in a bulk and download the zipped folder of all of them;
• Upload images right from the URL.

Image Optimizer is another option to use. It allows to choose the optimized image extension, but the visual quality of the optimized image seems to be higher with Smush.it tool.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

How & Why to Optimize Image Size