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You’ll hear me talk a lot about educating your customers, this generally comes under the subject known as “content marketing”. Essentially then you are using content, that YOU generate to educate your leads and customers. You should be creating content specific to your niche market. For me then, I am educating you in specific techniques and strategies concerning digital marketing.

Why?

You should be thinking about search engines finding your content. That is to say you actively write content based on what you think someone looking for your services will type into Google.  You can also write about a subject or issue that current customers may be experiencing, thus further aiding helping their endeavors.

For each single entry as a blog post/article it will create a unique link in Google that your site may be found with, if you write 200 articles, that would mean there are 200 additional links that may match with what a lead may type into Google.

Text or Images?

You should use a combination of both, but you must always consider that Google’s preference is text, and lots of it. Google understands text very well and by using lots of text you are able to help Google understand precisely what your article is about. This article then is based on why you should be using small images on websites.

Small Images?

As well as understanding the text of a webpage, Google also places a lot of importance on the page load speed, i.e. how quickly the page loads. It does this because generally speaking the faster a page loads, the better the user experience is. If you think about that for a sec it makes a lot of sense. How many times have you clicked the back button when you have been waiting for a webpage to load? It’s pretty irritating if it take more than a second, isn’t it?

So when you use large images this has a serious impact on page load speed, which is, well, very not good.

What Size Then?

When I refer to image size I am generally referring to the file size, not so much the physical size. I am talking about how many KBs or worse MBs the image uses up.

Example

In the above image I used for this article the original image was whopping 4MB, which frankly is enormous and will take much longer to load than say one at 1MB or 0.5MB. In fact the lower you can get the image, and still retain quality, the better. The one above I got down to 106KB which is 0.1MB more or less, which loads near instantaneously.

Simple Technique

Most computers will have some basic image editing software on them, for example all PCs will have Paint. You can open paint and simply re-size the physical size of images to a size that the page needs. In this example I lowered the original 4MB image down from 4000 x 3000 pixels to 600 x 400, thus reducing the file size to a great 106kb.

paint

Don’t Be Lazy

It’s easy to think you can throw any size image at a website and all will be taken care of by the website software itself. Whilst this is true in some cases, such as WordPress for example, it will still mean you will be filling up your website space quota unnecessarily. For example most of our client plans have a dedicated space allocation of let’s say 200MB. If you then create posts with 4MB images in them it will not take too long before you’ve used up all your space, 50 posts in fact. Whereas if you used images of 1MB each you’d be able to post 200 articles. This is sensible thinking then for page load speed and space allocation. Additional space can always be bought/upgraded but with this simple file size tactic you can get more for your money.

Facebook Makes Us Lazy

Social networks like Facebook make us lazy because we simply just dump our images onto the platform and assume it’s endless. The catch though is that it is not really free, Facebook creates the pay-off through advertising, so you are bombarded all day with paid adverts, revenue generating mechanisms that do indeed afford you to keep dumping huge images into the portal. Your own website probably doesn’t come with a billion dollar technology base behind it, and therefore use your space wisely.

Summary

Reduce your image file size before uploading, it’ll mean you get better page load speeds and more posts within your data allocation.