There are dozens of different ways to make your articles easier to read online; lots of smaller paragraphs, shorter sentences, big headings and smaller sub-headings and even the occasional gif from South Park or The Simpsons. One of the simplest and most effective ways of making your content look more attractive, to both online viewers and search engines, is to include a couple of great images to support your content.
Another great advantage that few people seem to pick up on when it comes to images, however, is that they can also bring in organic traffic of their own thanks to Google (and other search engines’ image search).
In order for this to be truly effective, however, and for your images to support your overall SEO efforts, they need to be optimised. It can be fairly time consuming, so for the best results we’d recommend making the most of the best SEO agency services in the UK.
1. Choose The Right Type Of Image – There are many different kinds of images which can complement your written content. Photographs, infographics, graphs and tables are all great ideas, although they aren’t all suitable for every kind of content. You need to put at least as much thought into the images you use as the content itself, as a poor visual choice can deter readers or even attract irrelevant readers, which is almost as bad.
There are a range of different image types which can be great to support all kinds of content, including:
2. Choose Relevant Images – It can be tempting just to attach any cool-looking picture that you might have taken to your next blog post, but you need to make sure that you’re using the most relevant images for the most relevant content – otherwise, your content can end up looking disjointed and confusing.
Aside from that, you will attract users who might be interested in the image, but not in the content itself. You aren’t just desperately trying to attract any kind of viewer – you want relevant visitors who are likely to connect or engage with your business.
Your images need to be of good quality. Remember that they aren’t they to distract from content but are designed, instead, to add to it.
3. Never, Ever, Ever Use Stock-Photos! – Stock-photos are the worst. They take all the uniqueness and personality out of your website. When you use stock photos, you are taking the personality out of your website and suggesting to the reader that your online presence is nothing more than a marketing brochure. Your content is there to provide real, relevant information and encourage your user to trust you.
If your business is presenting stock images as an actual representation of your business, then your potential customers are more likely to think that you are faking your online personality.
Not only can they really damage your business’ personality, they can end up costing you a hell of a lot – even if you think they’re free. If you use an image without the proper accreditation, then you could be facing a hefty invoice further down the line.
Stop paying for stock photos. You’re better off either:
You should be creating your own graphs, charts and other visual designs as well.
4. Free Image Resources – It is a sad fact that very few of us actually have the time to create our own images when we focus so much of our efforts on other kinds of content. Fortunately, there are plenty of free, simple to use resources online to help you find some alright images. They aren’t going to be as good as images you’ve taken yourself, but they can be extremely useful in a bind.
o Gif Grabber;
o Awesome Screenshot;
o Piktochart;
5. Optimising Your Images – Once you’ve managed to find your ideal image, then you’re ready to upload it to your site. However, you can’t afford to forget to optimise it before you make it live. There are a range of different ways you can do this, including;
If you neglect to effectively optimise your images, then you could not only be ignoring a potential boost to your rankings, but severely reducing the advantages that images can provide.
6. Know How To Handle Your Thumbnails – A lot of eCommerce solutions will utilise thumbnails to create great category pages. Many other kinds of website will use them for similar affect, such as many modern blog templates.
Thumbnails are great, but you need to be careful when using them too much; they can really drag down your page loading times. Usually presented in a critical step during the shopping process, and if they drag your load speed down too much they can really interrupt your customer’s eCommerce pathway. Longer load speeds can really cost you customers that you may never be able to earn back.
7. Use Image Site Maps – If your site relies on JavaScript galleries, image pop ups or any other “flashy” ways to improve your customer’s shopping experience, Google image site maps will really help to get your site noticed by Google. Spider algorithms and web crawlers can’t access images which are not found in the source code. To make sure they can find your images, you need to list their location in an image site map.
Google has a range of great image publishing guidelines which you need make the most of!
8. Take Note Of Any Decorative Images – Websites, particularly older web designs, have relied on a range of images for decoration. This can include buttons, borders and even background images. They might be great when it comes to adding aesthetic appeal to a site, or even a specific web page, they can often lead to a slow load time and a huge combined file size. You might want to consider a more minimalist design to allow speedy-loading on all kinds of devices. This can be essential when it comes to converting visitors into customers.
· A great idea is to make border patterns and simple images into PNGs. You can create good-looking images which are only a few hundred bytes in size.
· When possible, use CSS to create coloured areas instead of using block images. CSS is a great way to apply decoration without slowing your site down too much.
· Background images can be huge images. It’s understandable, seeing as you want them to be as high quality as possible. However, sometimes it is worth losing a little quality in order to make your web page much quicker to load.
One trick is to remove the centre of your background image, where your customers can’t see the image anyway, and replace it with a flat colour. Not only will it substantially decrease the image size, it won’t cause your site’s quality to deteriorate.
If you’re looking to optimise your online presence for search engines like Google, then making sure that your images aren’t detracting from your efforts is an essential component of your overall strategy. Thanks to the optimisation services on offer from the UK’s leading digital marketing and SEO agency, you will be able to reap the benefits associated with a visible online retail platform.
For more information, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our professional team of SEO agency experts on 0845 373 0595. Alternatively, if you have any questions regarding any of our marketing services, including our social media management, conversion rate optimisation or pay-per-click advertising, you can email any questions or concerns to sales@seojunkies.com.
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