Images are everything when it comes to a good blog post. Images add visual interest, add to the story or compliment the story you are trying to tell. Images can break up the “wall of text” and help the reader actually read all the way through your post. Images are good!
Here’s how to properly add images to your blog posts – with an eye towards SEO too!
Cute animals aside, your posts need images but there’s a system that you’ll want to incorporate into your workflow. The best way to show you that system is going to be with a video.
Watch the video on
“How To Add an Image“…
That seems pretty easy doesn’t it. Keep in mind the following:
- Always use your own images or images that you know you have the right to use. Copyright isn’t something to play around with. Typical legal take down letters these days come with $15,000 penalties. You can read more about using images here.
- Always resize your images before uploading them. Yes, there are image resizing plugins out there but it’s always better to do it yourself and save on the server loads. To resize on a mac just use “Preview”. To resize on a PC I really like https://www.irfanview.com/ for a free and lightweight program.
- Always set a Featured Image. Every post, every page should have a Featured Image set – if not for you, for the people who might share it on social media. SocNets will look for a designated Featured Image and if they don’t find one they’ll often pick one at random and that’s never a good thing. Read more about Featured Images.
- Always set your images to “Center Justified” or nothing at all. We live in a mobile first world and it makes no sense to right (or left) justify any image. See what I mean in this video.
- Always title your images and use ALT Text. Most images you take will come out of the camera titled, “img1234.jpg” or something similar. If you are looking for on page SEO you’ll want to rename those images using relative keywords that correspond to the image and your SEO strategy. The temptation here is to keyword stuff but please don’t. If you are looking to rank for “Sunny Acres” it’s ok to title a picture of that cute park in the neighborhood “SunnyAcresPark.jpg” and then maybe use something like “The cute park in Sunny Acres at sunset” as the ALT Text. That’s fine. Just remember – everything in moderation. You can read more about SEO here.
Surprisingly as you can see, adding an image is easy – adding an image “properly” takes a little more effort but it worth it. Anything I missed?
In writing this post I realized I have a few other posts related to this coming. I need to do a proper post on image justifications and in embedding the video above I realized there’s a whole system to properly embed a video.
If there’s something you would like to se me cover in future posts – just ask!
If you need a properly built website with a whole bunch of free training like this I have a button just for that:
Oh crap! I need a post on how to add a button!
Mike Mueller
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one,bought a cool orange one, and still rides a really slow one), he loves strong beer and good red wine.
Latest posts by Mike Mueller (see all)
- How to Embed a Video - February 12, 2019
- Don’t justify an image - January 23, 2019
- How to (properly) add an Image - January 15, 2019