Can i use base64 images (URI) for better SEO performance - faster site loading?
-
Hi,
Do you think the use of image data URI is SEO friendly? I got 20 JPG icons on each site, but use too many HTTP requests. So can i use base64 (URI) images for my small icons?
Thank you for answer!
-
There are pros and cons to it. I would just make sure you have some good caching rules in place and let it load once and be done with it. Realistically Google is not going to refuse to serve your page because you ran 20 http requests for some icons. That would be silly.
I try to remember that at the core of all things search related every search engines holy grail is the perfect result for your search query. In one of Matt C's videos they hit the subject of on-page factors versus content and he said they would overlook a lot of things in order to deliver the better result to the query. So for SEO purposes cache it and get to that content rocking. -
Hi,
There are some differing opinions on the benefits of using base64 images to reduce http requests. From an seo point of view I don't think it will make much of a difference one way or the other if you are only talking about 20 icon images, but from a performance point of view I would use css image sprites which also reduce http connections and are (in my opinion) easier to maintain.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Lazy Loading & Image SEO
I wanted to implement lazy loading on my whole domain, but was unsure about the effect on the organic image search. Therefore I implemented it some months ago on 3 selected URLs with medium organic image traffic. Unfortunately all 3 pages dropped significantly (roughly 80%) of image impressions and clicks (seach console data). It seems that just images within the fold, that are not loaded via lazy load are still ranking. Does anybody have here more positive experiences?
Image & Video Optimization | | _Heiko_0 -
Moving Images to Subdomain: SEO Impacts
For sever work- load enhancements we are planning to move our images to a sub-domain. so the files would be located at something like images.domain.com Rather than domain.com/images/ We are a large Ecommerce site so we have a lot of images. These will be self hosted so we are not using a CDN. I'm hoping someone has done the same and if there were any steps they had wished they had taken before making the move/ if they noticed any traffic impacts things like that.
Image & Video Optimization | | RMATVMC0 -
My wistia videos are not being index by Google. Does anyone know what can be happening?
I have the wistia site map on my robots.txt file and I also manually submit the site map to google. It shows that my videos were submitted successfully but they are not being indexed. Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | bedbugsupply0 -
Video SEO, should I do what Roger does?
As per http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo I want to rank with a rich snippet and improve my domain's overall ranking. So I am going to ignore YouTube and use Vimeo Pro (using old embed code). I will also submit a video XML sitemap and implement schema markup. Gotcha. Now let's check this strategy with what SEOmoz is doing. Let's take 5 Steps to Facebook Advertising - Whiteboard Friday it was uploaded onto the SEOmoz blog on 29 March 2013. Then on 4 April 2013 it was uploaded onto YouTube. As at 7 April 2013 (PST) I am not seeing the latest SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday Evolution of the Local Algorithm - Whiteboard Friday posted on YouTube. SEOmoz blog has a person written transcription, YouTube has an automatic transcript. There is a link to the SEOmoz comments below the YouTube Video. Cricky! They've gone all YouTube. Stop the boat. Or should I? My assumption is that SEOmoz is big enough so that it is willing to risk losing a few links to their YouTube webpages. Indeed they delay posting the video on YouTube for a week after it has been posted on the SEOmoz blog. What's more it ensures that there is a very good transcript on their blog. Top that off with comments (and I assume video sitemap and schema) and it is happy it will gain more from the traffic generated from the YouTube community than the potential loss of links to its domain, forgoing potential domain authority increases and resulting traffic. So Roger, I'm a little boat not a SEOmoz battleship cruiser, should I do what you do and wait for a week before I put my videos on YouTube? Or avoid the dangerous currents of YouTube stealing my domain authority and ignore YouTube all together?
Image & Video Optimization | | BruceMcG0 -
For Local SEO on a business with many locations, should the city be included in the business name?
For a franchised business with ~50 locations spread across the US, should the city be included in the business name when building citations? Fictional example: We have a staffing franchise called 'Hamilton Staffing'. They have 50 locations in the US. They are all called 'Hamilton Staffing'. We need to finalize the correct NAP information so we are consistent in building citations. For the name, should we just use 'Hamilton Staffing' for all of them? Or should we use 'Hamilton Staffing - Chicago' and the like for other locations? It looks like InfoUSA and Axciom are just using 'Hamilton Staffing', whereas Google is using 'Hamilton Staffing Chicago' and the like. Thoughts on this?
Image & Video Optimization | | brianspatterson0 -
New site, SEO well considered, no traffic :/ What next?
Hi There! We've built whatphone.com.au with SEO at the top of the list but things are not going as expected. Yes, there's still a lot of work to do, but I was hoping to get some guidance on what to do next to make sure we keep the right focus. This is what we've done to date: Added lots of unique and relevant content, particularly to our blog (and will continue to do so on a weekly basis) Ensured internal linking is strong Optimised each product page around product name (and relevant internal links pointing to it) Ensured the code is clean (ok, we are not a 100% but in a good place) URL structure, metadata, page titles, file names and alt tags following best practice Named the company and registered our domain around one of main keywords we are currently targeting "what phone" What we're working on: Link building Site speed Social signals Rich media (videos, more images) Not a bad effort right? No love from an organic traffic perspective 😕 Ok, the site / domain is no older than 2 months old, it's a very competitive industry, and no inbound links yet, but come on! Questions: Are there any benefits of engaging external providers to help with link building? I'm talking about outsourcing from elancer or similar.. Or is this playing with fire? Have we missed something obvious here? Any help will be greatly appreciated! PS: we currently have some issues with our pricing tables, but will fixed as soon as possible..
Image & Video Optimization | | whatphone0 -
Will putting images in a light box or photo gallery affect my image SEO?
A website that is very image heavy and would like to enhance the user experience with a photo gallery. How will this affect the indexing of these photos? Can I still add alt. tags and title tags to these images?
Image & Video Optimization | | Unidev0 -
Alt text in combination with images from another source / url
I have a feed that is parsed on my website. All images do come form another source( and url that differts from my site). However I can change the alt text. I concerns hotel mages worldwide. In order to relate the images with the different language I want to add a small phrase "airport hotel" translated in the laguages that are present on my site Example alt text will be alt="airport hotel: Mercure Schiphol Terminal" or in German alt="Flughafen hotel: Mercure Schiphol Terminal" Will this have a positive effect on my SEO despite the url of the images are not related to my site?
Image & Video Optimization | | fctexel0
