How Important are Images in a Blog Post?
Many people usually are more interested in reading something that has good pictures in them. Do you agree?
I'm sure you do. In fact, by just looking at the pictures, people somehow get a sense of what an article is about. If it piques their interest, they would be encouraged to read through.
So when making blog posts, it is very important to have pictures in them. Not just any picture, but the right picture. It can enhance the look of your page, grab the attention of people and draw them in.
Images are especially helpful if you're working on growing your blog traffic through social media. Whether on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter, your blog's images can entice people to click through and visit your blog. Who knows? They might also be encouraged to share your post with their tribe if there are one or two good images.
Now that we agree that blog posts should have good images, what's else should we know?
Let's answer the question ...
Where Can You Get Images for Your Blog?
You can use your camera or smartphone to take pictures that you can put on your blog. Or if you know how, you can create your own graphics. But it would take more time to create these images.
The other option is to use photos created by other people. But you need to make sure that you have the license to use the images.
You can buy images from stock photography sites like Istockphoto.com and Depositphoto.com, but it could cost you about $2 a piece to have the right to use them.
There is an option to use free ones available on sites like Pixabay.com and Pexels.com, that is if it's okay with you to have images that may be often seen used in many other sites as well. Of course, you can make an image a bit different by making some edits.
I use a graphic design tool like Canva.com (my affiliate link) to create images for my blog using a free account. Another tool I use is Stencil.com (my affiliate link). I got a lifetime plan with Stencil.
The last question we'll answer in this post is ...
How Do You Use Images in Your Blog Post?
I think there are three things that you need to keep in mind when using images:
Position:
Where in your blog post should you put your images? Usually, I put an image with the blog post title on top of the blog post. Then, I use one or two more images depending on the length of the blog post. Sometimes, I use one image per point centered on the page, especially when reviewing products. There are instances that I also use left-aligned images.
Size:
What's the size of the image you should create for your blog post? Actually, when I use Canva or Stencil, I just follow the recommended sizes there depending on where I will post the image. There are different size recommendations for different social media sites.
For a blog post, Canva recommends the image size 800x1200. I also use this image size to share on Pinterest. I also use the blog image sizes in Stencil, which are 1200x600 and 750x750.
SEO
I think I have slightly mentioned optimizing images on the first blog post of this series. Just make sure to use your keyword (if appropriate) for the image's file name and add the alt tag to describe the image, so that the search engines will know what is the image about.
So, that's all I have to say about the topic of this post. Just start adding images to your blog posts. You can follow your own style but keep in mind what was shared about the best practices of using images. If you have any thoughts you'd like to share, please leave your comments below.
This is the third post in our Better Blogging Challenge. If you missed the other blog posts in this series, just click the link above to find the other posts at the bottom of the page.
Thank you for reading.
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