livebooks blog

When it comes to websites, content may be king, but it’s most effective when combined with great imagery. And this isn’t just guesswork, either! A major portion of our brain’s primary functions is to process visual information, which is why your website should be visually appealing as much as it is informative.

If you’re a wedding industry professional, chances are you depend pretty highly on photographs to showcase your samples of work. As you should!

Couples love seeing examples of previous weddings. They are great for inspiration and give potential clients a sense of your style.

However, if your website images aren’t optimized properly, they could be doing more harm than good. Be sure you follow these search engine optimization (SEO) best practices when publishing images to your website.

Consistency in Style

Our first tip is more directly related to user experience, but when your online visitors are more engaged with your website, it can indirectly help your SEO.

Before you even think about adding a photograph, image or graphic onto your website, ask yourself some key questions:

• Does it match my brand?
• Will it speak to my ideal audience?
• Does it look consistent with other visuals I have already placed on my website?

If the image would look cohesive with your branding style, colors and niche market, great! Move on to our next steps. If not, look for something better (or create one yourself!). Remember to focus on quality over quantity.

Resize for Web Use

As great as high-quality photographs are for printing, big files (especially images that are several megabytes, or MB, in size) can only slow down your website load times.

Why does this matter? Well, for one, website visitors may leave and find another faster website if yours is loading too slowly. Second, your site speed directly affects how well your website performs on search engines like Google.

Photographs don’t need to be more than 72 dpi (dots per inch) for digital purposes. Most photographs, however, start around 300 dpi, causing them to be bigger in size (bytes). Ideally, images should be around 200-800 KB maximum each.

This may be way over your head, but you aren’t alone. That’s where liveBooks’ advanced image compression tools can help. When you upload your photos to your liveBooks website, they are automatically optimized for the best combination of quality and performance. If you would like to choose each image format on your own, then you can configure the advanced settings. You change an image’s quality and performance by dragging a slider – one direction will improve the resolution, while the other side will improve the image’s loading time and performance.

Image Titles and Alt-Text

Ever wonder how Google knows which images to pull up when you do an image search?

To put it simply, search engines use what they call “spiders” that scan through websites all over the web for information. In order to know what an image relates to or depicts, it relies on the image title and alt-text.

When your website images rank well for the same keywords within the actual content of your website (such as your services or about pages), your overall ranking for those keywords increases.

With liveBooks’ image tools, you have the ability to easily optimize your images for search engines. In the SEO tab, you can add keyword-optimized image title tags and alt-text to your images. For example, if you post a blog highlighting a recent wedding you photographed at a popular wedding venue, the image titles and alt-text should reflect keywords couples would search for on Google to see what weddings hosted there typically look like.

You might even add a few that focus on your particular role as a wedding photographer. Some you might use for this situation could be:

• Mansion wedding venues in Chicago
• Wedding photos at the Stan Mansion
• Stan Mansion wedding portraits
• Best wedding photographer in Chicago
• Chicago wedding photographer

Showcase Your Work on a Beautiful Website

liveBooks offers stunning, customizable website templates for wedding industry professionals and creatives.

Impress your potential clients with a visually stunning website that is ready for search engines and looks great on any mobile device!

We’ve also got a top-notch support team who’s here to help you every step of the way. Start for free today!