Blogging Basics – Is A Photo Important?
A Picture Is
Worth A
1000 Words
Blogging Means Finding The Perfect Photo
More than anything else, a blogger can spend most of their time working on writing a quality post. Photos are one way a person can enhance the effort they put in their writing skills. One of the biggest mistakes that any blogger can make is not to emphasize their photos on their blog. It can help readers to imagine or conceptualize your written communication. Photos can even help promote blog traffic to your site through the Google search engine.
Last week, in my Blogging Basic Series, I wrote about ways to find your voice again when a person has a hard time writing (see Blogging Basics – You Must Write!) In the post, I discussed the difficulties I had faced in writing my blog over the past month. One of the things I did not talk about was that my blog was still receiving significant daily web traffic (through photos I had published in the past).
As a blogger, I realize photos are an important part of writing. I try to make sure that I use the full potential a photograph can have on my blog.
5 Photo Tips
1. File Names – The file name of the photo matters. When you upload a photo you need to think about optimization for search engines. A descriptive name for your photo is what search engine spiders are looking for (preferably with the key word you want to rank within the search).
Non-optimized File Names
- 2010301_14623.jpg
- photo_edited-1.jpg
Optimized File Names
- Child-wearing-cowboy-boots.jpg
- Boy-crying.jpg
2. Alt text – It is easy for any blogger to forget how important it to use a descriptive alt text for a photo.
The two main purposes for alt text are for search engine spiders and for ease of access to your site.
- Alternate text that is descriptive and full of keywords helps a search engine spider to interpret an image and its content.
- Alternate text makes a website more handicap accessible. It makes an image readable to a person using “screen reader“ technology.
3. Image size – When I began blogging I didn’t realize that the size of the file actually matters. The primary reason that the size of a photo matters is because the larger any picture is the longer the load time for your users. Make your images as small as possible without sacrificing quality. I am slowly working back through my older photos to reformat their sizes.
- Pic Resize and Image Optimizer are both free websites that can re-size your photos for ideal blog usage.
- One of the abilities of many photo editing programs is to save your photos in a “web” ready format (compressing the picture). If you use Adobe Photoshop (my personal choice) start making it a habit of saving all of your photos with the option “Save For Web.” (no need to compress a photo then)
4. Featured Image – It important that you set-up a featured image for all of your posts! Many themes today use a featured image to find the thumbnail it needs to use in archives and categories for the excerpts of your posts (possibly on your home page too). If you are using sharing options on your blog, such as, Facebook or Google + a featured image is the default photo it will share (the photo you picked as your featured image).
5. Captions – If you have taken the time to make sure your photos are blog ready go one extra step and make sure it conveys a message (caption). Having a caption on all photos is important but not required (there is no known effect on SEO and not using a caption). A caption is the way that you can tell others what is noteworthy about your picture (a phrase or idea). A photo that does not use a caption can mean less to a reader.
Most bloggers consider themselves a writer and can forget that they are the sole creative entity in all aspects of their work. Taking the time to make sure a post has photos that are user-friendly can make any article that much better to a reader. Never forget that other people want to share in your success and hard work on your blog.
It doesn’t matter if you think of yourself as a photographer or not. A properly placed photo can add value to any blog. Do you take time to make a photo reader friendly (and search engine ready)? Is there one aspect you consider more important that the others? Please tell me more in the comments!!
You can read Part 1 to this post here Using Perfect Photos – Blogging Basics If you like this post you can follow me on my twitter @dadblunders.
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Tags: alternate text, jpg photo, search engines
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Excellent and informative post Aaron.
I’ve only just cottoned on to giving my photos optimised file names. Since joining Pinterest, people have started using some of my photos which is great but I realised that I had to get a bit more zavvy with my tagging of them – hence now spending more time on giving them proper titles, and not the jokey ones that I used too duh! I didn’t realise that when you click on an image the title pops up, how silly am I? The other thing that I’ve started to use is a digimarc for the photos that I feel precious about.
I need to use captions more – I’m not good at putting captions under my pictures – I put my hands up, it’s sheer laziness on my part. I shall take your advice. Also photo size, I like large photos so I hope that my pictures don’t take too long to download. I read something only yesterday that said how off putting it is for people when they click on a site and it takes more than 3 seconds to download! Maybe I should be looking in to that too. Any feedback about how slow/fast my site is would be really helpful.
Thanks again! Lottie
Lottie,
When I began blogging I kept all of my pictures “big.” It wasn’t until I began learning more about blogging that I discovered the bigger the file the longer it takes our server to load everything. I started using Adobe to save all of my files for the net in a “web ready” format. It helps because of the load time (especially if you have multiple people on your site and they are all looking at photos).
One of the best tools I have come across is a free service that shows you the speed of your site and can give you suggestions on how to improve it, http://tools.pingdom.com
It will give you a TON of information on your various load times and give you some basic information to help correct them. I know that there are many other places that can give you information but I generally turn to them first to check out a page and it’s load time. One other way to get a faster response time is a “dedicated” server. It is something I have been considering to speed my site up a little bit more.
I hope this helps you a little bit and if you have any other questions PLEASE feel free to ask. If I don’t know an answer I generally know someone who does!!
Aaron
Hi Aaron
It’s strange but a blog post without a photo just looks odd, doesn’t it?
For some reason they are less attractive and make me want to read them far less than when I see a photo that helps to describe what the post is about.
I use a lot of pictures from FreeDigitalPhotos so I tend to use the caption to give them a credit. I have thought about moving that to the end of the post though and using a descriptive caption. Something to think about!
Hey Tim,
I am always surprised how many blogs I visit that have little or no photos in their posts. I generally will use a minimum of 2 photos. The one exception I have been making is in my Blogging Series that I have been doing. I want to emphasize the ideas more and the photos less.
In fact, one of the main reasons I even started this series was to try and share with others some of things I learned along the way and NOT make some of the mistakes I have made. I know when I started out there was a ton of information to read on blogging but “many” of the articles were complicated and made a person feel like they needed a masters in Computer Science just to understand them. One of the biggest “mistakes” I made was importing everything I have done on Tumblr into WordPress.
Tumblr is wonderful and I still blog on there too but it is much more Xander/family focused with more pictures than I post on my site. Importing posts from Tumblr only partially worked for me. Many articles didn’t post correctly and the pictures “all” were posted in wrong formats. I am still working through older posts to get them SEO worthy.
My hope for the series is to simplify a few things and bring some ideas forward that are easy to forget. I know making any photo worthy of search engine spiders is worth it.
Aaron
Photographs are one of the most important parts of blogging. I love the writing part and feel confident in my abilities but when it comes to photography, I am really struggling. It’s so hard to convey everything through pics and take ones good enough to interest people.
Laura,
There are times that I have that issue (I think it happens to all bloggers). One trick I use when I am struggling with a photo is to think about one word that conveys the emotion I am looking for in a post; e.g., excited, happy, sorrowful. I will take the word and enter it into image search and look through the first page or two and see what other people think that it should convey. I also will use flickr photo share plugin and see what comes up directly in my search. It sometimes helps looking at other peoples perspective.
Aaron
You are right on all points, Aaron. Make sure to use long-tail-keywords on the alt image description and the main title (at least 3 words). Search engines seem to like that more.
Amberr,
Thank you so much! The series is a work in progress for me. I hope to just help a few people that might not know a few tricks or might not have learned about them. I do know I receive a good portion of traffic from properly tagged photos and it is worth the time.
Aaron
I used to post pics with nearly every post, but have been struggling with that lately, as often the pics I want aren’t ones I have taken. I used to do what a lot of bloggers do, just grab something off the web. But blogger Roni Lauren got hung up in a nasty copyright dispute that ended up costing her a lot of money, even after the pic was taken down…I became very cautious after that, making sure the pics I use are legitimately free for use. I often hop over to the WANA flickr page and grab images there – it was put together by bloggers for bloggers as a result of Roni’s issue by Kristin Lamb, but I don’t always find what I need. I am nearing the point of actively considering the cost benefit of istock or one of those services.
Lynnette,
I tend to play on the cautious side with photos overall. I am constantly taking random pictures of things just for a “possible” later use. I also have a flickr plugin on my blog that will automatically search for the photos that are in the common (it will then source it back to the original site too) I have a lot of photos on my flickr account that I have in the creative commons for others to use. I always hate the thought of not being able to find a photo so I let a lot of mine be used by others (as long as I get credit for the original work it doesn’t bother me overall)
I try to use a minimum of two in every post I do (occasionally just one). I know the studies I have read that people first look at the title and heading then they scan the pictures and the captions before they read an article.
Aaron
Lynette,
Go to my blog and search for Blogging basics for the post on places to get images that don’t cost a penny. There are 10 sites listed where you won’t have this issue ever again. FreeDigital and Flickr at Creative Commons are my most frequent “go to” sites. Good luck!
Warm Regards,
Amberr Meadows
Writer/Blogger/Social Media
http://www.amberrisme.com
Lynnette, You can search Flickr for photos available to use under Creative Commons. Go to Advanced Search and check the box that says “Available Under Creative Commons.” You will only be shown images that have those rights. There is nothing more frustrating than finding the perfect image but seeing that it’s labeled “All Rights Reserved.”
Carolyn & Lynnette,
Flickr is a great option and they have a wonderful plug-in that I use for my wordpress “flickr – pick a picture” It sorts through all the pictures in the creative commons for you based on whatever key word you choose in your search (the reason tagging photos is so important in flickr)
Aaron
Hi Aaron, Great and informative article! I resize using PicMonkey. I usually edit pictures so that way I have one-stop for resizing and editing.
I don’t set a featured image. How do you do that? How is it better if I do use a featured image?
I completely agree with you, images really can make or break an article. If I find a truly great image, that can drive all kinds of traffic to my site.
Thanks for this great tutorial!
Carolyn,
Featured images seem to becoming more standard. If you have set a featured image it tell facebook, google +, linkedin which image you would like to share with the world on your post. It also is the default image that others will share when they share your post to other platforms.
A featured image is also the photo that many themes are now using to show in your archives (it is the photo that is used in the synopsis) From what I have read and seen I believe all themes will be using them in the near future. It simplifies some of the work we normally go through to share with the world.
It was something that they started using in WordPress 3.0 and used to be called “post thumbnails.” There is an option in wordpress to set featured images. Hope this helps…if you have anymore questions let me know….
Aaron