Many website owners are in search for finding methods to increase their page speed after exploring that Google and the other search engines have placed much more emphasis on website page speed. In fact Google presented Google instant to show us how much page speed is significant.
SEO image Optimization
As many website owners and photographers know the most common picture formats is JPEG, BMP and TIF. These formats have been in use for a decade now and Google engineers have been in search of ways to find a better format that reduces load time. Here comes Google with a new image format called WebP. So what WebP is all about?
According to Google: “ WebP is a method of lossy compression that can be used on photographic images. The degree of compression is adjustable so a user can choose the trade-off between file size and image quality:”
SEO-ers and professional website owners have always been optimizing their JPEG images on their sites in order to increase the quality of speed. Now they can easily apply WebP format instead of JPEG.
SEO and Images on Your website
Images and photos make up about 67.5% of the bytes transmitted per a website. These images or pictures can slow down a user’s web experience, especially on a mobile network. So Images on the web consist of loosy formats such as JPEG, and to a lesser extent lossless format such as PNG and GIF. Google focused on improving compression of the loosy images, which covers the larger percentage of images on the web today
Those interested in SEO will likely find the status of the format worth paying attention to, because Google counts on page speed as a ranking factor. In fact, page speed of a website is only one of about Google’s 200 ranking factors.
Google has page set up where you can compare the sizes and load times of JPEGs to WebPs.In the site you can convert images to WebP format and download them Google also has a conversion tool to convert images to the new format that can be downloaded, and is working with the web browser and web developer community to add support for the format. For example You can convert a PNG image to a WebP image with a quality range of 80 with the command:
Google is also developing a patch for WebKit to provide native support for WebP. The webpconv command has the following syntax
webpconv [-output_dir dir] [-format format] [-quality quality] input_file(s). The Path is your directory where files are placed. If no path is specified, the files will be created in the input directory. The range is from 0 to 100; 100 is the best image quality with the largest file size. If no value is specified, the default quality value corresponds to a target peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) value of 42. A PSNR value of 42 is usually regarded as a good quality image.