Image Optimization for the Dispensary Website: 4 Suggestions for Added Visibility

The obvious reason to include images into your dispensary website is to improve the way it looks. More interesting things to look at makes for a better user experience overall. The less obvious reason, image optimization, helps improve the SEO for the website because it helps the crawlers further classify the elements of your site and rank it properly.

Make Image Optimization a Habit

Image optimization is more of a habit than a strategy because it’s something that a marketer can get into the habit of doing to improve site analytics. Once an image is uploaded to the media library consider these four suggestions for added visibility on the internet.

1. Source high-quality images: Stock photo sites are a great place to search for images. Your own original photos and artwork can be uploaded as well. Make sure your images are relevant to the text on the page, have good resolution, and add to the ambiance and interest of the site.
2. Consider page speed: Google will not index pages with slow load times and nothing can slow your roll like a bunch of high-resolution photos on a website. Stock photo sites will allow you to download stock images in low, medium, or high resolution. The best practice for website development is 72 dpi (low resolution) images. If you are formatting your own images, you can use Adobe Photoshop or the open source program GIMP to “export for web”. This will create an image file that is optimized to load fast.
3. Alt attributes are important: Setting an Alt attribute for each image will make it easier for search engines to find and categorize the image properly. The Alt attribute is a text description of what is represented in the image. Keywords can be used, however, Google will penalize sites that use this area for keyword stuffing. The Alt attribute can be edited within the image file once it is uploaded to the site.
4. Image names help SEO: Using descriptive keyword-rich file names when uploading image files can significantly improve your SEO. Resist the impulse to leave the file name that’s assigned to the image and choose a name that clearly indicates what the image is so the web crawlers can “see” it. Edit the image name before or after the file is uploaded to the site.

Optimize to Maximize

By using relevant and properly optimized images in the design of your dispensary website , you can improve your site’s SEO while maximizing the customer experience. Your optimized images can be read by web crawlers which help to classify and rank your site in the search engines. Image optimization also helps to satisfy accessibility best practices and makes the site useful to a much larger population than if there were no optimization strategy in place. Contact our team of knowledgeable website development professionals to optimize your dispensary website to maximize traffic.