Editing Images for Your Site

After acquiring images for your website, you'll need to reformat them since they're probably too large and possibly in the wrong file format.

The general rules are:

• In your final images, use .jpg or .gif file formats only.
  

• Images on your site should be no larger than 400 x 400 pixels at the most. A better size would be 200 x 200.
  

• Save the image in a reduced pixel size but with the same ratio (width to height) as the original or you will distort the image.
  

• Use a photo-editing program like PhotoShop, PhotoShop Elements, PaintShop Pro, or the free Gimp to resize, touch up, and save the image before uploading it to your site.
  

• Save the image with a simple file name which should be your main keyword for the page or post (to optimize for Google Images and the other image search engines).
  

To get the complete low-down on formatting images for top results in the search engines, check out this great article by Darren Rowse at Problogger.net:
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/03/12/formatting-images-for-seo/

TIP: Remember to keep the original image as-is, and file it in your archives – you may want to reuse the image in another format or on another website. Once the image has been reduced you won’t be able to enlarge it later without losing definition.