Image SEO and Why it’s Important
One thing that website or blog owners commonly overlook is the importance of images in their articles, stories and other posts. Having good high quality images that are relevant to the content that is on the page that the image is put on can improve the SEO (Search Engine Optimization), social sharing, user experience and interaction for your site.
One key reason that images can affect the SEO for a website or blog is that the major search engines, especially Google, have made changes to the indexing algorithms lately to give websites and blogs that have images on them higher rankings in their search results pages.
There is a lot of speculation as to how many images vs. how much textual content is optimum and to be completely honest, nobody but the search engine algorithm programmers and management know exactly what the numbers are. We do know that images of higher quality do get a bigger bump in search results pages as stated by the major search engine representatives themselves.
Another key reason that images are good for SEO is the fact that people love to see images when they are looking at web pages so they will spend more time on a given site and view more pages of that site if there are images on the web pages. This also shows the search engine websites that people like those pages so in return they will rank them higher in their search results pages.
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There are a couple of factors when adding images to the content of your site that you must take into consideration though. The first factor to think about is how relevant the images that you add to your pages are to the other content that is on that particular page.
If they are just random images that have nothing to do with the rest of the pages content then people will be turned off by the whole page and more than likely, never return to it and perhaps, never return to the site at all.
The second major factor to consider is the quality of the images that you put on the pages of your website or blog. People want to see high quality images when they are looking at pages on a site, and not some cheap highly grainy and low quality images that just look like they were scraped (copied from) from another website.
People tend to relate low quality images with low quality textual content so the last thing you will want to do is put up low quality images on an article, story or other posting that you have worked hard on. Higher quality images in the minds of many people mean that the content is also higher quality and that can help the success of your site.
In summary, you can see why having higher quality and relevant images on your website or blog articles, stories or other postings will have some SEO benefits that will help your pages rank higher in the major search engines search results pages and in return that will get more traffic for your site.
So do yourself a favor and make sure to include an appropriate amount of images in the content of your website or blog’s pages and you will get an easy boost in SEO for those pages as well as for your site itself.
Good Luck and may you reach the Apex in your Niche!