How does Photo sharing help in your Link Building campaign?
All content with no images! Is this something, that would interest you? Needless to say, visual presentation is always preferred over a mere narrative. How? Well, images gives the time to the readers to relax their mind by breaking the tedium of reading the article, sometimes it may even provide a little humor and thus, helps the content seep in better. Even better, it helps you get valuable links! Interested enough, now? But, unfortunately most of the webmasters fail at, effectively including images in their link building campaigns. This article is for all those, who have lost it with link building using images, telling you about how and what could you gain out of image sharing, the ways to do the same etc. Read on to know more.
Benefits of image sharing
There may be a lot of alternate techniques to link building, some to be considered good and some to be deemed black hat. While a lot of people would go for content driven links, let me tell you that images within a website also create a lot of potential for acquiring important inbound links. How? Here’s how:
- Humans have a psychological nature to catch the view of images before the textual content. Hence, your image gets noticed first and thus, have a greater potential to generate more traffic than your usual text links (provided they are meaningful and are adding some value).
- You have the option of optimizing your images with keywords, similar to anchor texts in your hyperlinks. You can use the alt attribute in images which will allow you for optimizing your image links for the targeted keywords. (but take care that your image is consistent with the keyword you want to rank for)
- Images go viral really fast. Social media provides a great platform for the images to be linked with thousands of people, getting likes and shares at the same time. Hence, making way for acquiring a lot of valuable inbound links.
- Your image links does not leak link juice.
- Image links let your link profile looks natural.
- If your image is well optimized, it also has the chance to show up in the Google image search results, thereby, increasing the traffic to your site.
Confused on how to use images for link building? Here we go!
Sometime back, I read that content with images receive 90% more traffic than content without images. But, unfortunately very few webmasters seem to market their images correctly in the link building campaigns. Here are some easy way to help you do the same:
- For starters, create infographics. You have no idea, how much the users love them! Well, why wouldn’t they? Infographics have a potential to present the most complicated information and statistics in the most easy, engaging and interesting manner. You just need a good graphic design and some really valuable information about an important topic in your niche and you are good to go.
- Include the images in your content in order to interest the users and increase their engagement into reading. It could be humorous, satirical or could be something which can provide an extra insight in your content.
- Optimize your images for keywords (be very careful of the relevance, though) that you want to rank for, so that your image shows up in the Google Image search results. This additional traffic to your website may be someone who is visiting your website for the first time and could probably become a new customer, a new subscribe or simply a new link.
- Use your images to link back to your site from another related website.
- Use images for promoting your seasonal content like whenever you go for a charity or a donation, post all your images.
- Use your images to promote your website on a social media platform. I recently read that, tweets with image links get 2x the engagement rate of those without.
But wait! Are you using and publishing the right images?
So, what’s right?
Source: SEO
This could be merely understood with four points:
- It can be funny or satirical. (Make sure you play safe by not hurting anybody’s feelings or accomplishments).
- It should provide an insight and add value to your content and to the understanding of the users.
- It should be clear with absolutely no blurriness.
- It should make a mark on the user’s mind and should be memorable.
While we are onto what should be the characteristics of a good image, let’s go a little forward and discuss what constitutes as a bad image as well:
- It has just been added for the sake of it. Never do that! It leaves a really bad impression of your website, if your users are left to wonder that, why the hell is this image here?
- The text is the image is not readable. The screenshots that you paste on your website should be readable and easily understandable by your users.
- It’s unnecessarily offensive or rude. This is going to get you a lot of hate comments.
- It’s very common and repetitive. Would you like to see the same memes of the ‘Star Trek’ again and again on every website? Well, the users would also not!
Now, coming to publishing the right image!
There are some things that you need to be careful about:
For beginners, go and read the Google’s Image publishing guidelines. Try to abide by these as much as you can, in order to maximise the chances of your images showing up in the search results. Most importantly, you should be very careful of the alt text. This attribute is especially important for the screen readers, so make sure you don’t make it a keyword dumping ground and use only those words which correctly define the image.
Quality of your image is very important. Make sure you specify the required width and height.
And lastly, make sure that your image is displayed properly and does not affect your website’s content alignment.
List of Do-follow photo sharing sites
If it’s of any help, we present you with the top 20 photo sharing sites, classified according to their PageRank
Page Rank 9:
1. Instagram.com
2. Pinterest.com
3. Flickr.com
4. facebook.com
5. Twitter.com
Page Rank 8:
6. panoramio.com
7. tumblr.com
8. picasa.google.com
9. jalbum.net
Page Rank 7:
10. tinypic.com
11. smugmug.com
12. twitpic.com
13. photobucket.com
14. photoshop.com
15. deviantart.com
16. imageshack.us
17. keepandshare.com
18. snapfish.com
Page Rank 6:
19. fotos.sapo.pt
20. mediafire.com
To sum it up:
The key to drawing the maximum attention of the users is a judicious and wise mix of content and images. This will lead to create a better opportunity for user engagement, brand establishment and thus, naturally building up link profile.
As, they say, “An image can speak a thousand words” .
I hope this article was useful to you. If you have any insights on the same, feel free to comment below.
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