Should you bother with blog images?

Are blog images worth the time and hassle?

Last week, as I was formatting the blog post Transform Your Copywriting From A Marching Band Into Cuban Party on The Page I was struggling to find the image I had in mind. In fact I ended up spending more time looking for a blog image than I did writing the post!

I began to question if it was worth it.

I vented my frustrations on Twitter and ended up chatting with a fellow who said he didn’t include blog images anymore and he didn’t see any difference in the number of people reading his posts. Not a single difference! So I posted the question on Facebook to see if that was the general consensus and I’m so glad I did!

I was reminded that images in blogs (and status updates) actually do serve a useful purpose. Quite a few in fact.

1. An emotive blog image can convey a message very quickly
2. The blog image can act as a memory trigger for your message
3. An image can really effectively break the blog post up giving your reader a break
4. The image (or headline) will capture the reader’s attention long before anything else
5. Search engine optimisation. That’s right!

5.1 When you use an image online you get to supply an ALT tag (or alternative text). While images don’t mean anything to search engines, the ALT tags do so they are the perfect place for your keywords.

5.2 When you use your keywords in the actual file name you get a double whammy of SEO goodness.

So in a few short days I went from wondering if it was worth the effort to being a blog image champion!

If you struggle to find an image for your blog or status update, check out these sites. And always make sure you have permission to use the image!

FREE IMAGES
www.sxc.hu/ Royalty free images. Images usually just require attribution.
www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ Royalty free images. Images usually just require attribution.

PAID IMAGES
www.bigstockphoto.com/ Royalty free images at very reasonable prices
www.istockphoto.com/ Royalty free images at pretty reasonable prices

While free image sites are a great place to start, it’s worth weighing up your time as well. I now check the freebies but if I can’t find what I am looking for, I’ll use one of my credits and finish up early!

Where do you get your images? Do you use images at all? Let me know!

The Copy Detective

Thanks to Bridie (Bridie’s Typing), Chris (MarketingHQ), Anna (Copybreak), Leigh (Promote My Fan Page), Miccilina (Social Media Surfer), Mihad (MIhad Ali Creations) and Edible Social Media for dragging me back into the light! And thanks to Chris (Click Web Design) for sharing Big Stock Photo with me.

Image by Phase4Photography on Bigstock.com

No related posts.

http://www.MaritaRahlenbeck.com Marita
Very interesting article. What is an ALT tag? Is that what the image itself is called?

http://www.copywritematters.com.au Belinda (The Copy Detective)
Hi Marita. And thanks!
An ALT tag is the HTML for the or alternative text associated with the image you are using. Search engines can only read the HTML code so the ALT tag is the way you tell a search engine what the image is. If you pop your keywords into that description that will also help the search engines match you with that words/phrases.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by what the image itself is called though…
The HTML tag to reference an image is IMG and it’s made up of a few parameters including the source, dimensions and alternative text. But if you have an CMS to manage your own blog/website you should just be able to insert an image without knowing the coding parlance.
http://www.marketinghq.com.au Chris Dale
Hi Marita,
The actual purpose of the alt tag is to help the visually impaired when they surf the net identify what an image is about. This is why the search engines can pick them up.
Most content management systems (I know WordPress does) give you the option to provide “alternate text” for an image. You’ll find this text comes up when you hover over the image with your mouse on your web page.
In terms of the actual file name, it doesn’t have to be the same as the alternate text but it’s a good idea to have keywords in their as well. Just makes things easier when it is consistent.
The key is to know what keywords you are targeting with your post and add them to the image as well as the post content.
Regards
Chris @MarketingHQ

http://www.copywritematters.com.au Belinda (The Copy Detective)
Thanks for the clarification Chris (and inspiration behind the SEO value)!

http://copybreak.com.au Anna @ Copybreak
I’ve too pondered the time spent on trying to find the ‘perfect’ blog image, but eventually realised as long as you have SOMETHING relevant, it probably doesn’t matter if it’s worth the thousand words you spent so much time writing.
I also tend to tag pics I think may be relevant for future posts while I’m hunting, so my favourites collection is slowly building up (if you work out a blogging schedule with topics/headlines in advance, you can also think about your pics in advance).
After hunting through a number of free pic sites, I’ve settled on http://www.sxc.hu as my main source, but there’s plenty of others out there.

http://www.copywritematters.com.au Belinda (The Copy Detective)
I agree that it’s a balance of time and value (like many things we do!). What do you use to tag your images? That’s a great idea!

http://copybreak.com.au Anna @ Copybreak
I’ve just been adding them to the lightbox… was trying to find the “appropriate” term for that. As the collection builds, I’ve been meaning to see if there’s a way to further catagorise them.
http://www.secretsecretary.com.au Shauna, Secret Secretary
Great blog, thanks for the info!
http://www.adamwozniak.com/ Adam Wozniak
Hi Belinda,
Great to see you writing an article about this! It is an interesting debate.
For anyone else reading this comment, I’m the Twitter “fellow who said he didn’t include blog images anymore and he didn’t see any difference in the number of people reading his posts”.
I gotta say – personally, I’m still leaning towards not including images on my blog. Apart from the SEO benefits, I think a lot of the other “benefits” mentioned above are debatable (and some are almost impossible to prove).
Did any bloggers you spoke to manage to find solid evidence (on their own blogs, for example) that images are actually accomplishing anything other than an SEO boost for them?
This is a genuine question.
I’d like to see some hard evidence, because I suspect a lot of other bloggers out there just assume that all these things are true, without having actually tested them on their own blogs…

http://www.copywritematters.com.au Belinda (The Copy Detective)
You are that very chap Adam! I’d love to hear what everyone thinks of your point of view because we didn’t get into measurable evidence… just their thoughts on the whether blog images served a purpose. But the numbers can reveal all …. Has anyone done a similar experiment to Adam and measured the differences?
It’s on my cards to do although I have a renewed interest in blog images!

http://www.adamwozniak.com/ Adam Wozniak
Actually, I did forget to add something very important (that I think we all forget in these kinds of debates):
The importance of blog images obviously depends on what type of blog you’re running. The same advice isn’t going to be applicable to everyone.
For example, it would make no sense for a photographer’s blog to have NO photos!
On the other extreme, if you’re running a blog that deals with the written word, then I’d argue that images in the post are much less important (and actually irrelevant). If a writer believes that readers won’t stick around to read their written content unless they include an image as well, then I’d argue that that is a major problem – and one that no amount of images will fix.
(Just as an aside – if the only remaining argument for using images is to “break up the content”, then I think that can be done just as effectively with lots of white space, lots of headings, and bullet points where appropriate).
Two examples I like to use of successful blogs that don’t contain images anymore are:
- http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
- http://zenhabits.net/
Their readers come to their blogs solely for the written content. They come there to get actionable information that improves their lives and businesses. Images are superfluous in that context. And I like that approach.
Anyhoo, that’s all from me. Would love to hear others’ thoughts on this (and some hard data too! ).
PS: In terms of hard data from my end, many of my top performing blog posts continue to get average time on page results of 4 – 6 MINUTES EACH. And that’s for short, 500-word articles (which definitely don’t take that long to read)!
What does that tell me? It tells me readers are getting something from those articles, and are enjoying re-reading parts of it to form their own thoughts and conclusions. And that’s exactly what I hoped they would do.
As one quick example. I recently wrote a controversial article about what happened in Japan – http://tinyurl.com/467z3eo . Conventional wisdom would have said that it’s important that I include an “emotive” image in that article to really bring home what happened there. I chose not to. Result? The article spread very quickly on Facebook and Twitter, has an average time on page of 4:58 minutes, and collected 137 “likes” on Facebook.
Kind Regards
Adam “That Twitter Chap/Fellow” Wozniak

http://twitter.com/TashWord Tash Hughes
I agree Adam – as a writer I rarely think a picture will enhance what I am saying (not a lot of images say “grammar is really important” for instance!) I add them occasionally for variety but I really don’t think (and I don’t have data either way) it is worth my time to search for images to use in every post I write.
I would also argue the SEO value of alt tags. That is, having keywords in the alt tag is good for SEO but if they don’t describe the image as well it isn’t helping the visually impaired and can be really obviously just an SEO trick.
However, it is interesting to read some reasons for using images, so thanks Belinda

http://www.cathytopping.com Cathy
As a photographer, I’d argue that images are everything!
Belinda, glad to see you advocating licensed imagery…so many folks just ‘borrow’ off the internet.
http://lutrov.com/ Ivan Lutrov
I agree with Adam when he says that bloggers just assume these things without testing them. Personally, I use them from time to time, but not always. Sometimes, it’s just not worth endlessly trawling the web (sxc.hu included) to find something which actually adds any value to human readers.
In any case, how would you accurately measure this? I don’t think it’s practical do even try.
Just to clarify something Chris said:
> You’ll find this text comes up when you hover over the image with your mouse on your web page.
Actually, that’s not the case. The “tooltip” text you’re talking about comes up as a result of having a “title” attribute. The “alt” attribute text comes up when you browse without images.
It’s also worth remembering the usability and (therefore the) SEO benefits of specifying the width and height of images, which so many bloggers don’t bother with.
http://www.encouragementfromastranger.com/ Adam Wozniak
Well, I’ve changed my mind on this debate.
I’ve just relaunched my blog (as a separate website), and have decided to start using images regularly. Apart from http://www.sxc.hu I also recommend http://www.everystockphoto.com/ for free stock photos.
So, what has caused me to change my mind?
I still don’t believe images make a difference to someone who has already landed on your blog post and is interested in what you have to say. My previous website’s stats was evidence of that (to me, anyway).
But for my new website, I’ve decided to use images for three main reasons:
- makes the blog post link stand out on social networking sites (such as Facebook), where the thumbnail is automatically displayed. No image = no thumbnail, meaning that your link is likely to get lost in the noise of text on people’s walls.
- it fits the tone of my new blog
- it adds some much needed colour and appeal on the home page (where recent and featured articles have thumbnail displays)
I don’t have any data to support the above benefits I’m aiming for, and I don’t believe images will make any difference to my avg time on page stats (for those who are already ON my website). But it MIGHT attract new visitors who never would have landed on the website in the first place. That’s something I didn’t completely consider before.
So the ongoing experiment continues. Thanks for starting this discussion.
I believe my backflip is now complete.
http://twitter.com/MMApages Jonathan
I totally agree about the keyword in the file name and ALT text. I don’t have stats but I’m positive that using images like that has brought me traffic. Funnily enough . Using just an image in a gallery with a highly searched keyword as the title has brough me a surprising amount of traffic by it’s self too.
http://companioncareservices.com.au/ aged care sydney
Totally agree. I think this article best describes what shall we know.

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