As you are probably aware blogs, have become increasingly visual over the years, with photos and images featuring prominently. For many bloggers, this is an alarming trend, however, as not only are they unaccustomed to sourcing images, but they 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 that 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 that you find on your blog, and it 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 an image just as a ‘filler,’ you may as well leave the space blank. Instead, when you add an image to your blog, there should be a purpose to it. 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
As you start to add images to your blog, you may notice that it takes much longer to load. That is probably because the images weren’t optimized, so it takes a long time to load and view them. Nowadays, slow page speeds are terrible, as you’ll not only lose visitors, but search engines may start to rank your blog lower as well. 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 to add images to your blog, you should make sure that you have an editor handy to make alterations and adjustments if necessary. 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, odds are you’ll notice that visitors favor it a lot more.
