The Value of Quality Images
Everyone can appreciate a useful, well-designed website; one that quickly provides them with the information they’re after in as much detail as possible. Even with all the necessary information, however, people don’t typically “enjoy” browsing through a monotonous-looking, poorly-designed. Why do you think that is? The answer is simple – because it is BORING. Making a visitor have to sift through text-heavy pages without any breakup of the content is a pretty good way to lose a viewer’s interest. Remember, a website shouldn’t be written like a novel, but rather act as a point of reference; a fact-finding resource. How can you help stymie the negative impression people might get when visiting your website? An easy place to start is by adding images to your website.
Images not only reduce the potential strain on a viewer’s eyes, but also help make all the texts seem “less boring”. Moreover, having an image or two in the proper place can really define the page, helping to capture the emotion or idea you want to convey.
What else can images do to help enhance your website? Did you know that they can also boost your search engine optimization? Curious to know how? Without going into too much detail, file names and alternative text tags (or “alt tags”) are SEO boosters. I recommend you adjust them to include your keywords. Check out our blog on this topic.
Search engines have also reported a significant increase in image searches, and now, with their improved search functionality, are able to more accurately associate an image with the given search term. What does this mean for you? That more people are browsing the web for images, and if your website contains images with corresponding keywords, they are more likely to come up within the image search results, resulting in an increase of visitor traffic.
Now... where do you get images for your website? Though our image gallery provides some stock images for our clients and your brokerage may provide some for use by all their agents, sites like www.iStockPhoto.com and www.Dreamstime.com license images for use on your website or in your other marketing materials for a fee. You may even find some free images at WikiMedia Commons, a Wikipedia site, but always read the license associated with it to ensure you are using the images correctly. Alternatively, consider snapping some images yourself so that you have your own unique images on your site, images that may be more local than those you may find in other locations. I recommend you use a decent camera as most older camera phones are fairly low quality.
Google Goggles is on the way. It is in the early stages but soon, people will be able to snap a picture, upload it to Google and Google will return search results on any image it has indexed that looks similar. It is much less reliable today than text, but Google continuously improves its technologies so someday soon, people may snap an image of something in the town square and, when they “Google it”, they may be taken to a page on your website.
Authored by: Bryan and Matthew