Given its importance in the sphere of communication and media, image is the most essential component of content marketing, and it has a significant place among the arts and instruments of expression. As a result, the image’s usage is controlled by regulations and laws that must be followed.
In this article, SEO Agency will provide you with everything related to using the image in a professional way for the WordPress site, and the wrong methods used in the process of uploading and using free images.
In addition, we will answer a question asked by many websites and blog owners, are Pixabay images safe for WordPress?
About WordPress:
WordPress
WordPress is a content creation and management tool that shares the same programming language as Facebook, Google, and Amazon. It is considered one of the most significant digital content management systems CMS.
WordPress Features:
WordPress has various advantages over alternative content making platforms, the most prominent of which are:
- Free and open-source software that allows users to download from anywhere at no cost.
- Suitable for beginners: you can easily find it among international search engines, moreover, it is a fast archiving software.
- Comprehensive management system: all you need from settings, additions, and tools to build any type of website.
- A large number of free and non-free Plugins and Themes that you can install.
- supporting all global languages and is a free source, so you may edit it.
- Constant updates from the official website to keep WordPress secure, and easy to change templates.
- High level of protection: WordPress has a team specialized in testing themes and plugins that are offered to different users.
- All tools and templates available for download are 100% safe, so we always recommend avoiding any plugins or templates from other sources and downloading them only from WordPress.
Types of images used in WordPress:
The digital image used on websites, like WordPress, is divided into several types, and each type has its advantages and disadvantages, and to know the impact of images on SEO, it is necessary to mention the advantages and disadvantages of their types:
1- “Windows Bitmaps” BMP:
It is one of the best types of images, and it has a large and uncompressed storage space, and any attempt to change its size makes it blurry and unclear, it is known for its richness in color as it is specific to Microsoft Windows only and is not compatible with web systems.
2- “Joint Photographic Expert Group” JPG-JPEG:
There is no difference between Jpg and Jpeg, but the Jpeg type is more extended and widespread compared to JPG, although they have the same format.
Jpeg and Jpg are among the richest and most diverse types of colors with important characteristics of good images, as they support images with color diversity from 24 colors and up to 16 million colors.
It is used more among image formats because it is compatible with most operating systems and mobile phones, and worth noting that this type of format does not support animation and does not support transparency in the image.
As for its drawbacks, it loses its quality as the compression size increases, and the image is likely to lose a lot of information in some places.
3- “Graphic Interchange Format” GIF:
This GIF format is used more in the field of graphics, cartoons, and logos with a small number of colors and graphics because this “Gif” format supports only an 8-bit border-color format with 256 colors.
One of its most important drawbacks is its inability to store a large number of colors, meaning that it is suitable for images with few colors, which do not have the same color diversity.
4-“Tagged Image File Format “TIFF:
Graphic designers, photographers, and desktop publishing pros are familiar with the format, as are Apple users.
It has high quality since it keeps all of the picture’s colors and information, and it permits preserving the image in layers. Its capacity to compress greatly while keeping accuracies, such as Jpeg, Zip, and LZW compression.
One of the disadvantages is very large sizes, which require a lot of time for uploading, and large areas for storage.
5- “Portable Network Graphic” PNG:
Designed specifically for use on the Internet, similar in form to GIF format, but its version is more advanced. The PNG format is known to be unaffected by compression and supports transparency much better than GIFs.
As for the drawbacks of PNG, it shares the same drawbacks as TlFF. It is not good at supporting large images, as they are of large sizes and sometimes larger than JPEG files. In addition, it does not support animation, unlike GIf, and some browsers do not support the use of PNG format.
What is the pixabay website?
Many websites provide huge libraries of images, but they may not be free, that is, you have to pay money for using the image. On the other hand, there are websites to download free images and use them on your blog, the most important of which is: Pixabay.
(pixabay) is the most used destination by content marketing pros, and it contains a large number of high-resolution images, and the site was launched by two people with German citizenship in December 2010, and it is licensed under the CCO.
Pixabay images can solve the problem of image rights, as it allows users to share high-quality images of the public domain, meaning that there is no legal accountability related to image rights, and depends on its funding only on donations.
Features of downloading pixabay images:
- Providing more than a million free images or designs.
- Using any image without the need to document its source, whether in its electronic or paper form.
- Speed of obtaining results.
- Several options for image size, from 100 KB to five MB.
- The advantage of using images for commercial purposes is that they are not subject to accountability for property rights.
Does using pixabay images hurt SEO for WordPress؟
impact of Pixabay
Many admins ask if using pixabay images hurts their site’s SEO or affects its ranking because they are not their images. Therefore, we will answer this question and give some tips on using free images, specifically from pixabay:
It is well known that search engines rate your e-commerce with images better than without them. So the final say is that using Pixabay images does not affect your site’s ranking in search results, because all images available on it are public domain or CC license.
However, it is important to make some manual adjustments to these pixabay images before uploading them to WordPress, which is a guaranteed way to avoid problems in the future. We conclude these modifications with the following steps:
1- Rename your image file before downloading it:
Always make sure to change the name of the image you want to upload to the website, because renaming the image file allows search engines to recognize it and put it in the appropriate category, otherwise, search engines will ignore it.
Note: if you make changes to the address from Attachment Details, you must use the appropriate keyword, so that both users and search engines can access it.
2- Create an appropriate “alt text”:
It’s a typed version that appears on web pages instead of an image, so it’s important to put appropriate alt text that describes the image to help make pixabay images accessible and better for search engines.
3- Using images with small storage sizes:
The size of the image plays a big role in its accuracy and clarity, in addition to the fact that the size has a direct impact on the loading speed of your website, so you should choose small images less than 200 KB, or you can rely on Photoshop to reduce the size of the image while maintaining its quality.
4- Prepare a sitemap image:
A sitemap is very important for all websites, and also an important image file because it helps greatly to improve the accessibility of your images while searching for them in search engines.
A sitemap is an XML file that includes URLs within your blog or website that enables crawlers to find all of your site’s URLs. It is also helped by many things such as the size of the sitemap file and the number of URLs in your sitemap, and it provides a complete index of all the addresses in your blog, making it easier for search engine bots to see.
It is good advice to put your sitemap file link at the bottom of any footer of your website (Footer). This will ensure that search engines will detect and track your sitemap and crawl your blog more effectively.
5- Make your website images compatible with smartphones:
Do not forget to make your blog images compatible with mobile search engines, because it gives you more ranking power and a better user experience, by creating responsive images, meaning that the image adapts to the size of the device whether the user is using a computer or a smartphone.
Read more: ways to make unique content for your digital marketing campaign?
Things to avoid when uploading pixabay images:
You should be aware of some illegal practices related to download free images, as they harm your site:
- Upload the same image without editing on other image sites, republish and sell it on those sites.
- Selling the same image without making any edits to it, whether it includes a physical or digital product.
- Reveal the identity of people by clearly indicating who may be present in some of the photos.
- Exploiting pixabay images to create corrupt content or disseminate malicious information about a brand.
How to use Pixabay؟
Those wishing to use images from the site are required to register for it for free through a Facebook account, Google Plus, or Microsoft account, or create an account directly on the site if desired, to upload images without having to enter each time the phrase “CAPTCHA” which indicates that the person who The process of uploading images is done by humans, not a robot.
Download pixabay images and upload them to the WordPress website:
You can download the image from the site according to easy steps, and then upload it to your site according to the following:
- Enter the site via the link available to it and log in with a Facebook or Google account, as we mentioned previously.
- Enter the available image library, type a keyword about the image you want to download, and the search results are displayed.
- Click on the download option and save as and we choose the appropriate suffix for the image.
- Open WordPress and go to upload the images, as it is usually on the left side in a box under the name Upload an Image, and the Media Library appears for us, then we choose the image, and then the upload process looks after seconds.
- Choose the appropriate sizes, add an alternative title and description to the image and click the Upload button.
Do the caption and description of the image affect the SEO?
It is one of the common questions about the possibility of search engine optimization, the caption and description do not affect the SEO.
Briefly, an image caption is defined as additional information about an image that appears below it. The title and description are different from the “alt text”.
General tips to improve your site loading speed:
Loading Speed Site
It is known that having a large number of images on your site slows down its loading speed, which causes a bad experience for visitors.
Here we will give you some tips to improve the speed of your website with a large number of images:
- Continuously clear your site cache.
- Compress existing images as we mentioned previously.
- Stay away as much as possible from using YouTube clips on your site, use Vimeo as an alternative.
- Reduce the use of CSS and JavaScript codes, and choose a fast server for your site.
- Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), and if you are using WordPress, make sure that the sim you are using is fast and programmed correctly.
In summary, the use and publication of Pixabay images on your site are one of the best opportunities to increase the rise of your site on search engines, make it one of the favorite sites for visitors, or interact with your publications on social media, but it is important to be fully aware of how to use Pixabay images in a way legal, and that you understand the copyright licensing.
