Images are an essential part of a website. They keep engage users and if used properly can really enhance the overall appearance of a web page. As helpful as images are they can also have a serious negative effect on your website if you forget some crucial guidelines while using images
Royalty-free means that a license must be purchased in order for you to have the authors permission to use their image. Use caution in where you are purchasing your stock images. Not all websites that sell stock images are necessarily selling images that they have rights to sell in the first place, which would mean you are not really purchasing a license, but rather just giving money to someone who illegaly took someone else’s work. People often believe that it is ok to use any image that is found on Google Images. There is high risk in using Google Images because there is a lot of work that can be displayed in your search results that is copyrighted material.
Don’t risk being sued for illegaly using images. There are many websites where you can purchase royalty-free images below is a list of some recommended places to checkout if you want to have royalty free-images
There are millions of photos that are available for use through public domain. It is important to become familiar with Creative Common licenses. Freelance writer Meghan Ward wrote a very informative guide to all the Creative Commons logos and codes. Click here to read the article. There are lots of resources out there to find free photos but I would recommend you use everystockphoto.com
You could also always use photos that you’ve taken. The main objective of photos should be to engage and relate to your audience. If you have photos that can accomplish that then you should use those photos.
No one likes a slow website. Yet, one of our biggest mistakes as website managers is we upload photos with large file sizes. It may sound intimidating to compress imagess to reduce file size, but the beauty is that it’s actually really, really simple. Go to tinypng.com. You can upload your images there and then download the compressed version of your photos. Your visitors will appreciate that you took the extra step to optimize your images.
Have you ever wondered how search engines find your photos? Truth is, there isn’t a person that goes online to filter out millions of photos and tags them so individuals can find them online. You can optimize your photos with “alt tags”. Use alt tags to your advantage and try to clearly define the photo in relation to the web page. Using alt tags such as “tips for optimizing images” is much more effective than using “camera” for the image used in this post. Remember that alt tags should be short and concise. You DO NOT want to add bulk keywords to your images because search engines will interpret that as spam. A bad example of an alt tag using the same example would be “camera, tips, marketing, photos, images, websites” etc …