Why you should use SVG images on your website (and how it can help your SEO)

So you may have noticed that a huge trend in web design is having custom illustrations and branded graphics. If you haven't, don't worry, just check out this article!

Branding and custom visuals can help you communicate your brand, create a more visual experience, and give your company a unique look that is incredibly valuable.

That said, blurry and pixelated visuals or visuals that take forever to load can be your worst nightmare, or, at least, a designer's worst nightmare. No worries! With a few small tweaks, you'll see that your site has gotten better and better. With a few small tweaks, you will be able to achieve a beautiful user experience in no time. All you have to do is save those great logos and custom visuals in SVG format.

What is this SVG you speak of?

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format was developed in the 1990's and is a vector image format for 2D graphics based on XML. Check out this article for more facts and figures about the SVG format.

Now, even you technical people probably know exactly what we're talking about, but here's what it means. the SVG format uses text to describe the appearance of a graphic element or vector image.

Yes, you read that right! A bunch of text to make those cool visuals on the web and in print. A text-based image format sounds a little counter-intuitive, right? That's why it's important.

Scalability

The traditional format used for web images is JPEG. JPEG works best for real-life images such as photographs. However, if you save your custom visuals as JPEGs, they will be rasterized, which means that the pixels are assigned to a grid.

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Once rasterized, you can't edit or resize the original content. Because the SVG format relies on text, they have no predetermined size or grid. svg relies on vectors, or lines and shapes, rather than pixels. No more worrying about blurred or pixelated visuals.

The name SVG says it all: these files are made to be scalable. Scalability allows images and graphics to be displayed clearly at any size. For the web, this means that your visuals will be crisp at all different screen sizes and resolutions.

Since there is no size or grid to bother with, SVG files are much smaller, which can improve the loading time of your website. As for printing, you can send your visuals to the printer without having to worry about a poster or banner being blurry.

Editable and optimized

SVG has the added benefit of being easy to edit. While rasterized images like JPEGs are difficult, if not impossible, to edit, SVG files can be edited using a text editor and, of course, a vector graphics editing tool like Adobe Illustrator.

Simply saving these great visuals in SVG format will help them look neat and beautiful on every screen and at every size. SVG files tend to be much smaller than other formats like JPEG and GIF. You can even optimize your SVG files further by simplifying vector and compressed files. Smaller files mean faster load times and better optimization of your unique website pages.

SEO Benefits

SVG images can improve your site's SEO in more ways than the user experience. SVG is a text-based format, and another added benefit is that search engines can read, crawl and index your images.

With other images, search engines require a title and description to read your image, which means that search engines cannot crawl the actual content of your image. If you like your title and tags, you can still add keywords and descriptors to your SVG text to help search engines better read and crawl your visual content.

How to get SVG images

To convert your previous file to SVG format, open your source file in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop and export the new version as SVG. If this whole sentence seems too daunting, you can find simple file converters online that will convert the file for you. Yes, it really is that simple! You can also download a large number of copyright-free svg images her: httsp://www.svgkey.com