Why Pictures Are Important For Your Blog
Say cheese! By including pictures on your blog, you’re adding much more than visual appeal to your posts.
You’ve finished writing a brilliant post for your blog, but it’s missing something. Something visual that adds synergy to your content. You may think of pictures as an afterthought, but they are important for your blog. We’re going to touch on a couple of reasons why they should be included in your blog articles.
Curb Appeal
If all you’ve got on your page or post are words, it’s going to be pretty dull and daunting. Invite people into your website with vibrant, vivid pictures. If you want to pull people into what you’re saying, the right picture will paint a compelling story. Feel free to break up longer stories with pictures. But make sure that the photos are relevant to what you’re saying. Pictures should enhance the content, not overshadow or distract readers from your message. As well, photos should be of high quality. If you’re taking the pictures yourself, make sure they aren’t blurry or out of focus. Your content is high quality and you want the pictures to be complementary.
Support What You’re Saying
If you’ve got something that could be construed as complicated or information that features a lot of data, a graphic element can help readers understand what it is your saying. Infographics, graphs or diagrams can explain your point—sometimes even better than you can. Just think of it as another way to get your point across. And if you need some help making your own custom graph or infograph, we’d be happy to help you out!
Sneak In Some More SEO
Yep, you can even sneak some of those all-important SEO keywords into your pictures. It’s surprising how many people don’t take advantage of this simple trick. All you have to do is change the name of the picture to something that has keywords in it. Let’s say you’re writing an article on snowboarding and you want add a photo of a super-cool snowboarder. The keyword you’re going after is snowboarding in Ontario. So instead of IMG001, you’d change the name of the picture to snowboarding-in-ontario. Bam! Just one more reason why Google will notice your awesome article on snowboarding in Barrie.
Bonus Tip:
If you’re using WordPress and you’re uploading a photo to your post, here’s another way to optimize your pictures for SEO. Once you’ve uploaded the picture, you’ll see a text box after “Alternative Text” where you can put keyword content. Using our snowboarder picture, you could add something like “Snowboarding in Barrie is super fun.” Feel free to add a caption too—let your readers know that they can have this much fun snowboarding in Barrie.
Do you add pictures to your blog? What visual elements have you noticed on other people’s blogs that you’d like to implement on your own? Tag and share your thoughts on Twitter or Instagram.