As you are probably aware, blogs have become increasingly visual, with photos and images featuring prominently. For many bloggers, this is an alarming trend, however, as they are not unaccustomed to sourcing images and may not be sure how to use them effectively. If you plan on starting to use images in your blog or already are doing so and want to improve on it – here are a few useful tips that you should always keep in mind:
Make sure the images you use are legal.
It may seem like a good idea to take a photo or image you found somewhere on the internet and use it in your blog – but more often than not, that’s a bad idea. As a rule, you should always find out whether you can legally use images on your blog, which helps to understand how licensing works. Nowadays, many websites provide stock images and photos that you can use legally – so why break the law when there’s no need to?
Have a purpose in mind when you add images
Try to avoid adding images just for the sake of adding images. More often than not, if you’re adding a picture just as a ‘filler,’ you may as well leave the space blank. Instead, when you add a photo to your blog, it should have a purpose. It should relate to the text and can be used to provide context or act as a visual example.
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Optimize images to avoid slow page speeds
You may notice that it takes much longer to load as you add images to your blog. That is probably because the photos weren’t optimized, so loading and viewing them takes a long time. Nowadays, slow page speeds are terrible, as you’ll not only lose visitors, but search engines may also start to rank your blog lower. The good news is there are lots of tools to help optimize images for the web, so it shouldn’t be hard to fix this issue. If you start adding pictures to your blog, you should ensure that you have an editor handy to make alterations and adjustments. With the tips listed above, you should find it much easier to source and add images and photos to your blog. As your blog gets more visual, you’ll notice that visitors favor it a lot more.
