Photos and video are excellent tools to liven up your online content but they also factor in your page load time and your SEO rankings.
If you put a little extra work into your photos, the benefits will outweigh the work.
The SEO Benefits of Web Photos
A photo on the web is more than just a simple image. There are layers of information at play on your images behind the scenes. If your photos aren’t optimized you’ll miss out on a whole host of added benefits.
Page Load Times
Search engines hate websites and pages that load slowly. When Google and other search engines rank websites page load time is one of the factors they examine closely. If your pages are loaded up with high resolution images and videos chances are your load times will stink.
Keep your file sizes as small as possible and your pages will load quickly and easily.
*Tip: Save photos for web and devices to keep your file size low. This feature solves the file size issue while keeping the image as crisp as possible for visual appeal. Most photo editing software has ‘save for web and devices’ as an option.*
Keyword Support
Did you know that your web photos can lend support to your keyword of choice?
When search engines rank your site’s pages they use a multitude of factors to slot you into a position. The keyword is factor #1. Putting your keyword in the title, body copy and meta data of your pages makes search engines take notice. The more places your relevant keyword shows up the better and your web photos are just one more place to stuff that keyword in.
Save your web photos with your keyword in the filename and your pages will get an extra SEO boost with no additional work.
Media Diversity
Web pages made entirely of text are less dynamic and even less user friendly according to the rules of search algorithms. When a search bot scans your pages for information they are looking for different sources of media on your pages.
Video and photo files are considered helpful, engaging and interactive so search bots take note. They assume the more media (with small file sizes) your pages have the more users will appreciate your content.
Simply having media elements present will increase your rank.
The Visual Appeal of Web Photos
Long before SEO factors came into play images and video were just for show. SEO benefits aside the visual appeal of media elements is still their main function. Here’s some of the other online advantages that comes from strong media files:
Breaking Up Text
Newspapers have known for years that huge blocks of text are hard to read. That’s why they break up their copy with photos and pronounced quotes. From a visual standpoint it’s much easier to read a long article if it has some accompanying materials and highlighted info.
The web is no different.
Breaking up your web copy makes it more readable and easier to digest. Make sure your message gets through to your readers. Diversify your online material with pictures.
Increased sales with photos
Getting online customers to convert on a sale is difficult to begin with. It’s even harder if you don’t show them what they are buying with a few informative pictures.
It’s a well-known fact that products with videos and descriptive photos convert to a sale much more often than those without. Take your product listings the full 100 yards with interactive medias.
More ways to get found
Every piece of material you post online is another way your website can be found. In search engines, you can define the parameters of your searches, filtering content for the items you actually want to view. Refining that search to show only images is a regular practice for many web surfers researching a product.
If your product images are properly labelled, your photos could lead a potential customer right to your electronic doorstep. Name your images appropriately and you’ll create one more pathway customers can find your through online.
Online, your pictures are worth even more than a thousand words. Optimize and streamline your material for the maximum SEO impact and visual appeal.
Here’s some more blog posts to help push your website to the next level:
Content Marketing Part 1: What is it?
Content Marketing Part 2: Image Marketing
Content Marketing Part 3: Video Marketing
Local SEO: Getting found locally
