Do you want to drive real traffic to your website?
You might try out blogging communities, content curators, social media, SEO writing, and other traffic methods; and they worked! But, did you try to increase your website traffic through proper picture use?
Yes, there are ways you use images that will increase considerably your audience; and, images can help double the result for any other used method. We will talk about 4 ways to drive traffic to your website through the proper picture use in this article!
An image is worth a thousand words; it is therefore more effective than the headline. It can be used to promote your website at the first impression.
For promoting articles, it is good to create images that contain text, illustrations, people photos, and screenshots. Using images in your published article will boost your site traffic considerably; let’s consider 4 ways proper image use can drive your traffic.
1) It improves your Search Engine Ranking
Do you write epic and search-engine-friendly articles? I am sure you do, but you’re not the only one. There are a lot of authors who do the same thing, but images are used differently; name count, and alt tag count and you can rank higher by simply using pictures properly. Studies have shown that search engines favorite long articles well written which have 3+ images above similar writing without images.
Send signals to search engines; as images normally serve as illustrations, it looks for search engines, that an article with images, is somehow detailed. While you will keep your article readable, with more text than image, you can improve performance with illustrations and images well optimized.
2) It catches special attention in listing
You can get more traffic from listing by using images properly. Are your articles listed on blogging communities, directories, feeds, or anywhere else? You can get special attention to your article with a great picture.
It is known that the headline is the key decision for someone to read an article, but you have up to 130 chars (70 for SEO purposes)!
If you fail at creating a headline that catches their attention, you can rely on images for that! You have the opportunity to tell a thousand words in a simple graphic.
According to your kind of content, you can use text as images, high-quality photography, and so on…
3) It increases your social media audience
Micro format helps us to increase our social media audience. And the image is the key to grabbing the attention. If you use the open graph, microformat.org tag, or similar, your image will help you look better in social media feeds. Social media users tend to interact with posts that attract them, and visuals do it better than textual headlines.
Also, there are social media around pictures such as Pinterest, and Instagram! Using high-quality pictures will just benefit your audience and help you get more from social shares.
4) It gets you traffic from search engine results for images
Another way you can use images to drive traffic is through image searches. Optimizing your image with proper alternative text (alt tag) is a great way to show up on searches engines results. Images have a dedicated section on most search engines and usually show up on regular searches.
Usually, as the bot doesn’t understand images, it is recommended to fill alt, title, caption tag, and use micro format!
While you are using images with text, you can easily catch user attention; they will lend them on your website to read more…
By proper image, I mean the image that is the most appropriate to your kind of content. And for quality images, you can use for free, check out our post on best royalty-free stock photo sites!