We all know that great content is important for your visitors and search engines alike. But having just text on a blog post is boring, uninviting and simply lacking visual interest.

Large social media platforms have embraced the importance of images to illustrate their textual content. Facebook launched timeline making images (and even videos) take center stage. Pinterest’s popularity is continuing to grow at an exponential speed and they display primarily images. Does it mean people do not read anymore? No. It means people expect “beauty” and images can help making a blog post prettier and more interesting. The notion that “A picture is worth a thousand words” is not new and is something you must remember when preparing a blog post.

VISUAL

At the very least, we recommend that you have one strong image which relates directly to the content of your post. If you are chatting about the virtues of tofu, you should have a photograph of a nicely prepared dish with tofu in it. Take a look at the image at the top of this post. Don’t the fruit look fresh and appetizing? Posts with images also get far more traffic than posts with just textual content. Some surveys show as much as 90% more traffic. Not convince yet?

SEO

Images in your blog post can also be optimized if you name them properly before uploading them onto your blog program. Example: If you blog about cool shoes, name an image “coolshoes.jpg”.

They are also many fields that can be filled out with each image: Alt tag (alternative tag mainly seen by search engines bots not visitors), title tags (which is a mouse over tag displaying text), caption, etc. Make sure you take the time to fill out each field for each blog post. It will help your SEO efforts and may increase the ranking of the specific blog post. If you Google a keyword, you should notice a category named IMAGES at the top of the search result page. If you add and optimize images for each blog post, these images may be indexed in the images section of Google and other major search engines.

VALUE

An image can also explain something that may be difficult to explain in words in your post. When you buy furniture that needs to be assembled, the manufacturer will always have pictures or graphics to illustrate each step. They do this because it simply works! So if you want to add value and explanation to your copy, add a photo or two.

Preferably each blog post should one main photo at the top (like ours) and one placed within the content itself. Use high resolution images and make sure you have the rights to use these images. The fact that they are available on the Internet does not mean you have the rights to use them on your blog posts … but this is a different blog for another day.

Happy blogging!