Why you need stunning images on your blog posts
The blogosphere today is so competitive that most bloggers don’t stand a chance. To give yourself the best shot of success you need to make your posts stand out from the crowd. Your content needs to be remarkable and, most importantly, linkable.
It’s no secret that blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo get the most links to their posts. In fact Engadget averages 2348 links to each single post. Their reporting isn’t that much better than everybody else so what do they do that other sites don’t?
One answer is in the quality and originality of their images. Engadget has a team of talented writers and people who can produce cool images within minutes of a new story breaking. The images are not just good pictures of a particular gadget they are original, never seen before images that other bloggers can use on their posts.
If you are the source of a breaking news story you will get far more exposure and links if you can find a unique image to add to the story, if a larger site is looking for stories they are far more likely to choose a site with a stunning image than a boring, text only blog post.
What if my topic doesn’t need images
Every topic needs images to illustrate certain points. Whether you are trying to post about website bounce rates or how Google crawls websites, images can work wonders to make your blog appear remarkable.
Long term traffic
Including a stunning image in every blog post brings benefits long after the post sunk into your archives. Having thousands of images on a site will bring a huge amount of traffic from Google Images which you can hopefully leverage to your advantage.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Any suggestions on getting free images?
I often link videos from youtube.com etc for images (and content!) — but haven’t found great photo sites.
Thank you!
I sometimes use Google Images to get decent pictures.
As long as you credit the source with a link it is usually acceptable to use these.
Otherwise try searching Google for “free images”.
I use sxc.hu
The best photo site, IMHO.
Hmm, yes this is a really good idea. My next blog entry was going to be pure text, but I will try your suggested technique and add an image to strengthen the message or something?
I don’t really know of any freely available image banks, but for cheap quality images I use istock photo.
For non-product related blogs where photos aren’t really applicable, I find the easiest way to include more images, colour and vibrancy to your posts is to use linked screenshots instead of text links when referring to other sites on the web – here’s an example: http://urbansurvivalproject.blogspot.com/2008/01/cooling-down-with-little-something.html
Or better still, if you can find time, try and convey your thoughts and ideas using simple diagrams and visuals. I find Powerpoint pretty good for this because of the auto colour formatting options it provides. Visio is also worth considering for more complex stuff. Plenty of examples at our blog if you’re interested. Just click the link.
You can use Flickr as a resource for free images, if you give proper credit. Just be sure to look for the Creative Commons licensed images and follow the guidelines. I agree w/ Matt Arnold above, that http://istockphoto is a good source of quality photos. You buy credits and small web-sized images are $1 (larger image sizes are more costly). They also have a free photo of the week on their site. The quality here is uniformly good.
One of the recent posts on our site about finding images suggests thinking about images that illustrate the Concepts behind your post. So if a post is about writer’s block – you don’t need a writer at a computer screen, but any image that either shows frustration, or that shows breaking through. Each image has an emotional tone or shading to it, that can sift a reader’s initial response.
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January 15, 2008 at 10:01pm