If you want to maximise your blog post’s readership – it must be illustrated – it’s as simple as that. It would be better to run an image with no text, than text with no image really. You only have to look at the popularity of infographics, Flickr and most recently Pinterest to understand this.
Think photo journalism, images tell us immediately what the post is about. They also tell Google what the blog is about – if properly optimised. Google image search is a trick many blogs miss.
Here are 4 basic things to do that ensure the images on your blog are optimised for search.
1. What’s in a filename?
Search engines need words to understand what your image is about. So rather than saving your image as img0001234 for example, pick the keyword relevant to your blog post, e.g., business-blogging.jpg Use common file types such as .jpg or .gif
2. Describe your image
‘Alt’ text is used to describe an image and helps those who are not able to see an image, know what it is about. This includes search engines, who examine alt text to determine the content of an image and build information about the webpage content. Don’t over-do the keywords (Google may detect this as spammy), add proper description too. Here at BlogStar, our alt text usually closely follows the title of an article so it is keyword optimised but also provides search engines with a clear description of what the post is about.
3. Fast loading pages
People get bored with slow websites and Google penalises them (quite rightly). Large images slow down page load speed, so resize them before uploading to the blog. Don’t go too small though, for impact, images need to be larger than thumbnails. Usually, we find in the region of 250-300(width/height) is a good size for illustrating posts.
4. Relevant pictures
Finding good, rights free images for blogs is not easy but not impossible yet it defeats many blog managers. A cheesy low resolution image of your in-house guest blogger is not likely to get your readers pulses racing. Nothing says sales pitch quite like a five year old picture of the MD! A good picture however can make pedestrian copy much more interesting, a poor picture does the opposite.
If you need help with images or blog copy, why not outsource to us?
