[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to the final module in this course. You've learned the value of quality photography. How to take beautiful product photos for your business? And now it's time to bring all your learnings together by building your Shopify store. To start in this lesson, I'll teach you three strategies to optimize your photos for SEO. SEO stands for Search engine optimization, this helps customers discover your business, when they're searching for a product like yours.
The first way to improve your SEO is with image optimization. Image optimization is all about reducing the file size of your image as much as possible, without sacrificing quality, so that your page load times remain low. Did you know that nearly 50% of customers don't wait three seconds for a page website to load. Amazon found that if their pages were to slow down by just one second, they would lose $1.6 billion a year.
Google also uses page load times as a ranking factor in their algorithm. So if you have images that appear slowly on your screen, you may be saying goodbye to a lot of potential customers. The good thing is since you're using Shopify, your images are automatically compressed. So this shouldn't be an issue for you. You can also use Shopify as imagery sizer to help you with this, if you have a massive photo file.
I've included a link in the resources below for how to do this. If you're working with the designer or a developer, you can ask them to help you optimize the images. As a rule of thumb, I like to make my images no larger than 200 kilobytes. But I shoot for the smallest image size I can possibly create. After optimizing your photos and creating your Shopify store, you can run through your store through a number of websites like kingdom.com to see how fast your loading time actually is.
The second way to optimize your images is by naming them with relevant keywords to your business. Keywords are words that used to describe your business that the customers would actually naturally search. So for example, when you upload a photo to your website, it will have some sort of generic name like DC image 125.JPEG. The way to optimize it, is to rename it to black 5 panel hat.JPEG, for example.
The third way to optimize is to create your alt attributes. Alt attributes are helpful for website accessibility. When a customer sees your image, they can hover over it and see the name of your product you're selling. I'll actually show you how to do this in less than three, when I create my Shopify store. The Alt attribute also adds SEO value to a website and can help you get ranked a little bit better in Google.
So I've shared some simple rules for Alt tags in the resources section below. Now that you've discovered the value of optimizing your photos, in the next lesson, I'll show you how to start your Shopify store. [MUSIC PLAYING]
