Check out a range of different websites and you will notice one thing: they all have copious numbers of images, videos and graphics. Why is this exactly and why should you take notice?
Images are very important. A really basic website with text and nothing else is pretty boring. You might read the content if it is really interesting, but 99.9% of people will click on by almost immediately. This isn’t just true of websites. Books are also more appealing when they have images positioned in the text. Images help to maintain interest. They also help us to make a judgement on what the content is all about, which in the online world is all-important.
Find the Right Balance
Images help to balance out a page. Too many images or huge blocks of text are off-putting, so the key is to find the right balance. Sometime, just one image positioned at the top of the page is enough to draw a casual reader in and excite them enough to want to read the article. It is also helpful to break up long articles with regular images as this increases reader engagement. However, the image does need to fit the text.
Why Use Professional Images?
Thanks to the wonders of digital photography, anyone can produce decent quality images these days. In fact to a certain extent we are all professional photographers, busy snapping photos on our iPhones, adding a cool filter and posting them to Instagram for instant dissemination around the world.
There is a big difference between professional images and your holiday snaps, however, and if you are building a business website, professional images are definitely the way forward. Professional images are more suited to business websites because they are of higher quality. This is especially true in the case of e-commerce websites since customers are much more likely to buy a product if the image is professionally produced.
Images and Link-Building
One of the less obvious benefits of using professional images as part of your web design strategy is that other people might be tempted to use them also. On the one hand this is not good – particularly if webmasters swipe your images without asking permission, but on the other, it is not such a bad thing.
UK link building services providers can use images as a link building strategy. If you suspect your images have been used on other websites, perform a quick search online. If you do find any that have been used without permission, instead of issuing a DMCA takedown notice, ask the webmaster politely if they will credit you as the owner of the image and link back to your website. As long as the website is not a SPAM site, this will give you some valuable back links.
Finding the Right Images
Using a professional photographer to produce bespoke images for your website is definitely a good investment, but if your budget won’t stretch to this, look for suitable high-quality images from a stock-photo website instead.
And if you are still not convinced, take note of the fact that articles with images included enjoy 94% more views.