Bring Life To Your Content – But Don’t Forget The SEO Factors

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

A page full of text can be pretty dull; in fact it’s often downright boring. Including pictures, cartoons, photos or even a video can help to break up the text and make the page visually more appealing. There are two mistakes that content authors often make, the first is the size, placement and number of images and the second is the basic SEO factors that are required.

When it comes to size and placement, images or graphics should not dominate a page unless they are the page, or the central focus of the page. Even then, a little commonsense goes a long way. Generally speaking and depending on how much text you have, two or three small graphics can be better than one large graphic since the large graphic can take over the page and ruin its overall effect.

Irrespective of size, there are several SEO factors that should be considered. The most talked about are the alt tags. The alt tag helps to tell the search engines what the graphic is all about. The real key to using the alt tag comes from being aware of where the image is within the surrounding text. The alt tag needs to describe the image but that description needs to tie in with the text that surrounds it. Using keywords can be helpful particularly if the surrounding text is optimized for that keyword.

The days of producing content and inserting pretty graphics to tart up the page are gone. Graphics, video included, needs to be relevant to the overall page and needs to have the right content within the attributes, titles, tags and descriptions. This is the information that is important to the search engine. Remember, search engines cannot see. They can however read and it is the SEO factors that provide that information to them.