If you have limited time and money to spend on marketing, every move you make needs to be packed with a punch. Where words are the vehicle to eloquency and detail, pictures are highly-concentrated impact machines. On the internet, images take on a life beyond what meets the eye- to use them effectively, make sure that they are searchable, clickable, and shareable.
Pictures are not merely decoration for your internet domains; they can also act to generate traffic if they are searchable. Google Images is far and away the most popular way to look for pictures online, so it is important to consider how this search engine operates. First of all, Google only considers images which have the following formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG. If you aren’t using one of these formats, your pictures will be invisible to search.
Secondly, Google can’t actually “see” your pictures, so the text which you associate with them is of vital importance to their searchability. The alternative text is what appears on a browser when it is impossible to load the image, and so it is precisely what Google will see and use to understand what the image is about. Moreover, although Google doesn’t actually use the filename in its search, it doesn’t hurt to use an informative rather than generic filename- if IMG00042.JPG depicts a fuzzy baby duck, why not call it BabyDuck.JPG?
Together the filename and alternative text could look something like this:
<IMG SRC=”BabyDuck.JPG”
ALT=”Fuzzy baby duck”>
The text which is near the image is especially important for identifying it and for increasing its “rank”- Google may rank a picture surrounded by strong textual content higher than the same picture found in a gallery without much information.
It is also important to make it easy for Google to find your pictures. You should allow crawling of your images and image-containing pages by both Googlebot and Googlebot-Image; the former will often come across an image and signal it to the latter. Lastly, to really make things work smoothly you should submit an “Image Sitemap.”
Once a user has found your picture, he or she may want to interact with it. If your picture shows a product or service that you are selling, it won’t be working at full throttle until it is clickable.
Data shows that pictures can lead to purchase, but that it is important to make it easy to click through. Only the most motivated purchasers will see an image of an item they want on your blog and then go to your web site and look for a place to buy it. Make life easier for everyone involved by turning your pictures into clickable portals.
Finally, you can increase the reach of your pictures by making them shareable. To tap into the network of sharing, you will need to have a presence on social media.
Facebook and Twitter are a must, and the quickly-growing Pinterest is particularly interesting for organizing large numbers of pictures and/or for reaching a primarily female audience. All of these social media platforms offer tools which you can build directly into your webpages to make sharing a one-click process.
Using pictures effectively on the internet requires a few extra steps beyond making a smart aesthetic choice. Make sure that your images are searchable, clickable and shareable if you want them to work at their full potential for you!
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