As you are probably aware blogs have become increasingly more visual over the years, with photos and images featuring more and more 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’s 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 or not you can legally use images that you find on your blog, and it helps to understand how licensing works.
Nowadays there are lots of websites that 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.
- 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 and so it takes a long time to load and view them.
Nowadays slow page speeds are extremely bad, 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 so you can make alterations and adjustments if necessary.
With the help of 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.
