5 rules to follow when uploading images to your website

Images are on most websites these days. With so many uses, it's not hard to fill a page with big, beautiful imagery. BUT there are some hard and fast rules to follow when uploading

The good news is you can DIY the lot! 

Our guide will help your SEO and website speed

1. Image name

Don't upload an image that came straight from your camera or iPhone. The main reason is your device will name your image for you AND the file will be the wrong size. Normally way too big!

Say your image is called DSC5689.jpg and you upload that straight to your website. When someone does a search for your product or service, your image isn't going to show up. If you sell turtle food to turtles and the image is of turtle food. Call it what it is! Premium turtle food.jpg Now when someone searches for turtle food, your image has a better chance on being found. Because Google knows what the image is! You should be describing the contents of the image in 3-8 words. 

PRO TIP: Separate the words of your file name with a hyphen (dash). for example, Premium turtle food.jpg should be Premium-turtle-food.jpg Wanna know more? Check this out:

2. Image size

The average size your full-width image needs to be is 1920pxs These are your hero shot found at the top of your website or CTA banners and sliders. Depending on your target demographic, you might want to use a wider image to sustain the use of wider screens. This could apply to designers, video editors etc. But seeing as over 80% of those accessing websites use mobile devices, 1280px is plenty big enough.

Also for consistency on your site, choose a series of image sizes and convert any new images to that size.

Want a guide of the most common image sizes used? Well, we have one handy! Yes you need to sign up to get it, but you can unsubscribe at any time. We don't spam, aint nobody got time for that!

SIGN UP TO GET YOUR COMMON IMAGE GUIDE

3. File size

Keep that image as small as possible without losing clarity. Nothing over 1MB is a good rule to follow. 

Google wants your site to load fast! Google uses load times to decide your website ranking. With this in mind, you should make sure that you aren't overloading your website with huge images. A website visitor will wait no more than 3 seconds for your website to load before giving up and looking for another, faster, website.

Try to keep your images below 100kb when you can. This can be increased to a maximum of 1mb for particularly large images but avoid it as much as possible. To reduce an image's file size you can reduce the width and height of the image and reduce the resolution to 72. This change is easy to achieve on software such as Photoshop or Canva. You can also add a plug in to your wordpress website that compresses your images further. We use Smush – Lazy Load Images, Optimize & Compress Images By WPMU DEV

Google image load times
Image source

4. Alt image text

Alt-text refers to images alternate text. This text is linked to an image on the back end of a website. This alt-text should be a short and basic description of the image. It is not a caption so it will not be displayed on the webpage but instead be visible in the Meta information. Not many website visitors will look at your websites Meta information but the reason you need to add this alt-text is that it will both increase your SEO and make your website accessible

Google loves websites that are more accessible to everyone! It helps your SEO as Google will penalize a website that fails to add alt-text. 

PRO TIP: This also allows vision-impaired peeps to read your site and know what the image is of. It's making your site more inclusive and we think that's how all sites should be!

5. Metadata

Adding metadata to images embeds important details into the digital image itself, including copyright notices, author information, date(s), location(s), and descriptions. Embedding these details into archival images is a best practice employed by professional registrars, collection managers, and other industry experts. 

This isn't a must-have but if you make it best practice then it will help you in the future! It is more techy than the rest and you will need a program like Photoshop to do it.

Image metadata can help protect digital images of your original artwork from being misused or misrepresented. Metadata also enables images to be more easily searched for across the web and successfully located than images without metadata. 

Well there it is

Our advice on images for your website. We hope you have a better understanding and insight for best practices. For more help with your site make sure to contact us

5 SEO foundation hacks

No doubt if you have a website you will be wondering how it's going out there in the big wide world. SEO is its best chance at finding the right audience for your industry. We are going to provide you with some hacks to set your site from the start. 

If you CBF reading this right now and wanna skip straight to the download, go for it!

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We get it! You CBF reading right now and will probably forget where this blog is. Happens all the time!

To save you the hassle, hit the button and we will email it to you.

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Stalk Your Competition

We all take a sneak peak at our competitions socials occasionally. Its time to take it a bit further. Understanding your competition is critical to outranking them in organic search. Pick 3 businesses who rank where you want to be ranking in organic search, not the ones you consider to be your competitors.. Start a word doc on each. Get their web address, social media links and any other digital profiles. Set aside a day at least to go through it all. This is what you need to look at:

  1. How fast their page loads, if it's faster than yours talk to your web developer to see what you can do to speed it up
  2. Do they have blogs?Are they interesting and informative or just shit?
  3. Is their site easy to navigate? Are the images good?
  4. What’s their socials  like? Are they highly engaging? What conversations are they starting? How many followers do they have.
  5. What other digital profiles do they have?

Make sure you have your basic UX is down pat

We bang on about User Experience all the time. That's because it's so freaking important. If your clients can’t read or navigate your site, then you are losing business. There are a few tests you can do yourself:

Check out your website on mobile, iPad and desktop. Make sure all the pages load properly, the text is legible and images aren’t cut off. If there are issues, speak to your web developer to get it sorted.

Get reviews

It's time to start taking reviews seriously. Reach out to your best clients and ask for a review on the services you provided them. Make it easy for them by providing a link directly to your Google reviews. Facebook reviews are good too but Google is better.

Google uses ratings and reviews data in its local search algorithms. It's part of the ranking criteria. Not to mention feedback from your previous or current clients, let prospective clients know you are the real deal. Trust is a massive art of decision making for your clients.

Get cosy with Google Search Console (CSG)

GSC is the way Google communicates with webmasters worldwide, providing alerts and data. If you don’t have it, set it up now! If you run into trouble, ask your friendly web developer for help.

Check your GSC monthly. It will show you if there are any issues, penalties, and other crawl issues. Check out the page experience, performance, coverage, security and manual actions. These sections will alert you to any issues that Google has in crawling and indexing your site all for free!

Track it

Track progress and set measurable goals. Optimization involves basing your future actions on what you've accomplished in the past. If you don't know what your goals are or don't track them, your optimization is simply based on a whim. We all know how that goes…

You can measure success easily by setting realistic goals and tracking metrics. Most sites use something to measure data, start with your site and GSC Just make sure that you're not basing your optimization efforts solely on rankings.

5 ways to improve your website

Do you have a website for your business or brand?

When was the last time you ran a report or even looked at it? Or are you wondering if your site is any good at all? Would you like to find ways to improve it?

Fu*k yes you would!

For the month of February we are offering free website audits. Normally valued at $150 + GST for freeeeee! Because we love you and want to see your website live its best life. It is an overview, not a deep dive into every page, product or profile. We are looking at the basics and foundations.

We customize our reports just for you, no generic sh*t here. We actually take the time to look at all the bits and pieces that go into making your site kick ass and take names.

How's your SEO

I have no doubt you have touched on SEO at some point. Even the non-tech savvy person (probably my dad) would have at least heard of it.

No matter if you understand it or not, we create a PDF report on your website. We go through and explain it to you so you can understand what needs to be done to improve your SEO foundations.

Maybe you know a lot about SEO and want a second opinion. This is for you too.

What is your User Experience (UX) like?

It's all good and well to have an amazing looking site, but can your clients or potential customers navigate it? Sometimes the best-looking design is not functional.

We know how frustrating it can be. You will lose traffic as your customers get frustrated with your site. We look at a heap of different aspects of your site.

Creating a custom video helps us explain to you what to do to improve your site.

Is your site responsive?

A responsive site looks just as good across many devices. Your website's content/design/layout is going to change based on the screen size/orientation/resolution of the viewer's screen.

So it will look different on desktop, tablet and smartphone. This gets overlooked a lot in the wonderful world of web design. We see it in a lot of old sites that would have traditionally only been seen on a desktop. Did you know over 80% of visitors accessing your site are using a smartphone or tablet?

So best to make sure your site ticks all the responsiveness boxes.

How’s your site's branding?

We are a brand first agency so it makes sense we add this in. We can’t help it! It is seriously the first thing we look at.

Often business owners use different providers for websites, socials, email marketing and more. Unless you have a branding manual, the lines get blurred.

We make sure it’s consistent and provide you with tips on cleaning it up.

We check out all your digital profiles

Its true, we check your social media and other digital platforms your business is on. Why? Well, it ties into SEO and branding.

From the SEO aspect, we are making sure keyword consistency it used. Branding is the same, we are looking at brand consistency. Colours, graphics fonts.

We want your customers to know as soon as they see your digital profile, who you are and what you do.

We have saved all this info and put it into an E-book, free for you to download anytime.

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Get your free website check

If you have made it this far you are ready for a free website check. Click the button below and it will whisk you off to our form.

Special bonus! If you want to see how your site stacks up against your competitors, add their web address and get insights to their sites.

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WTF is SEO?

We hear the term SEO every day but do you really know what it means? 

According to the Urban Dictionary it's:

Like Voodoo and Witchdoctors, SEO is an evil term used to describe the ways SEO Optimizers believe they can beat the system by making you believe they know what will get your search ranking to the top. Most of the time SEO is achieved by throwing darts or mixing chicken bones with blood.

They’re not wrong, but they also aren’t right….

The actual abbreviation stands for Search Engine Optimization. 

Let's break it down further:

Search = Try to find something by looking or otherwise seeking carefully and thoroughly.

Engine = a machine with moving parts that converts power into motion.

Optimization = the action of making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource.

In this case, the engine is Google or Bing or whatever search engine you use. We play by Google's rules because they are the majority when it comes to search engines.

We feel SEO is a wanky marketing term used to scare business owners into thinking they need this thing…and if you have a website and digital profile, you do need SEO. BUT we don’t think it relates just to your website.

Traditionally SEO is the process used to optimize a website's:

Search engines recommend SEO that benefits both the user search experience and the page’s ranking.  By featuring content that fulfils user search needs. This includes the use of relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and headlines (H1), featuring descriptive URLs with keywords rather than strings of numbers, and schema markup to specify the page's content meaning, among other SEO best practices. If your head is spinning, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most misunderstood terms when it comes to websites and digital marketing.

You need SEO

If you have a website, you need SEO. You can have the best looking website in the word but if the SEO isn’t set up then how will people find it? Setting the foundations for your websites SEO is a leg up. Considering that Google processes billions of search queries daily, organic search results are a very large slice of a very large pie. And while there is some up-front and ongoing investment required to secure and maintain organic rankings, every click that sends traffic to your website is completely free.

We also feel SEO encompasses your entire business online profile. From your website to your social media and any other online digital profile used. Here is why:

  1. Social media provides backlinks to your website
  2. The copy used in your social media should reflect the messages on your website. Focusing on your sites keywords
  3. Hashtags on Linkedin, Instagram and TikTok all created around your sites keywords
  4. Names of images used on all socials and digital profiles. Images are the most overlooked and easy to do with relation to SEO.
  5. File names and overall look of your designs.

Are you picking up what we are putting down?

We are saying to fully improve your SEO, focus on your website, social media and digital profiles. It also ties in with brand consistency and messaging so you are kinda killing 2 x birds with 1 x stone. Not that we are a pack of bird killers. Have you seen our website and socials? 2 x of our staff members are parrots.

Are you interested to see how your site and digital profiles stack up?

We are here to help you reach your SEO goals with a Free Website Checkup. You get a PDF report and explainer video. All valued at $150 + GST. Totally custom and free. 

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HOT TIP 💡 If you need help with your SEO we work with foundations only, not ongoing SEO. When looking for an agency to play the long game with SEO for your business, look for someone that comes reccomended or works soley with SEO. As in they don't do all the things, they do SEO and they do it well.