How to Pick the Right Imagery for your Blog Posts
Humans are visual creatures. If you haven’t heard that before…well, we just don’t believe you. What’s the first thing you look at when you click to a new webpage? An image. What happens when you click to a new webpage and there’s big blocks of text, with no image in sight? Usually, you get overwhelmed and leave the page.
Images everywhere…
Imagery rules – just ask Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and all the memes out there in the world. Which means…you can write the best blog content in the world, but if your imagery is boring, nonexistent, off-point or some combination thereof, your blog will suffer. You’ll lose readers. You’ll lose confidence. You’ll stop writing your blog out of despair. Save yourself from despair – pick the right imagery for your blog posts.
How to Pick the Right Imagery for your Blog Posts
1. Pick imagery which enhances your blog.
Ask yourself: Is this imagery making my blog easier to read? If the answer is no, find a different image. You want your blog to look appealing – you’ll keep visitors on your site longer if the image enhances the overall design of your blog.
2. Pick imagery that you have permission to use.
We talked about places to get imagery on the fly in this blog post. If you want to make sure you’re not taking any imagery without permission, brush up on the Do’s and Don’ts on this post from HubSpot.
3. Pick a relevant image.
Uhh, why are there ducks in this post? Photo Credit: Cinzia A. Rizzo / fataetoile via Compfight cc
Be creative, but creative in a way that makes sense to your readers. You don’t want to draw in readers who are eagerly expecting a post about miniature ponies, only to discover that you’re discussing space exploration.
4. Pick an interesting image.
Boring imagery will hurt clickthroughs, just as irrelevant imagery will. Make it eye-catching, make it interesting, make it appealing, make it high-quality. If you hit all these points, you can’t go wrong.
5. Pick imagery that looks good in the place you put it.
Lots of bloggers have different rules of thumb for this rule, and we like to keep it general, for ourselves. If you have even a little bit of a design eye, preview your blog post multiple times before publishing. Try putting your imagery in different positions and see which one looks best.
If you don’t trust yourself, stick to a rule. This blogger recommends always placing photos to the center or right of your post, for example.
6. Optimize your imagery for SEO.
Mostly, this involves setting the alt tag of the photo to accurately reflect what the image is. Search engines can’t read images, so they read the alt tag instead.
It can be too easy to wimp out on picking the right imagery and settle for something sub-par. But in this highly competitive, image-centric online world we live in, your blog can’t afford for you to settle for less than appealing. You don’t need perfection, but you do need to draw in your readers. Pick the right imagery for your blog posts and watch your clickthroughs start to climb…