The steganography is the art of hidden; its main aim is to pass unnoticed data in another data. There are many types of data that used in steganography, such as message, image, and video. In this work, we are interested in hiding a message inside an image. Our work focuses on the study of three approaches based on least significant bit (LSB) techniques that mean put the bits of the message in the least significant bits in each pixel of the image. Moreover, we propose an improved approach for LSB-based image steganography. In this approach, we reduce the length of hidden message by Deflate algorithm which is a lossless data compression algorithm that combines the LZ77 algorithm and the Huffman algorithm. Another important characteristic of our approach is to protect the reduced hidden data by AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm. Our experiment results show that our improved approach is most effective compared to existing approaches.