How to use images on your business website for competitive edge
Images have a significant impact on your business website design. Images can make your website look great but images can also downgrade your website design.
If not used carefully images can hamper your website speed, leave a bad impression on your customers. Images can make your super website design look less than ordinary.
It doesn’t matters how good you are with color psychology. If the right images are not used at right places all your efforts to build an awesome website will go in vain.
On the other hand if used wisely images can enhance your brand image and can easily convey the message of the text on your business website. Lets start with the concept of using images.
Why to use images on your website?
There are a number of benefits of using images on your website. Below are some of the important ones.
1) Images attract people
Visuals always draw attention and what is better than images to add visuals to your business website easily. Websites with images attract more visitors than websites with no images.
You can test it yourself by adding few good relevant images in some of your pages and leave some without any image. You can easily get the test statistics from Google Analytics. If you are not familiar with Google Analytics, you can learn it in our comprehensive guide on Google Analytics.
2) Boost conversions
It doesn’t matters if you have an ecommerce store or a membership website or may be a personal blog. Images always help your website reach its goals and that is what conversion is all about.
Images on product pages in and ecommerce website can impress customers and persuade them to make a purchase.
Images on membership websites on right places can pursue your website visitors to sign up for your services.
If blog posts have good images then there are very good chances you get more and mores subscribers to your blog.
3) Images help in SEO
Images can boost your Search Engine Optimization if you have named your website images properly, provided them with a good caption, alt text and descriptions.
Your web pages can come up in web search results and images search results in Google or any other search engine.
Including original photos or info-graphics gives you a chance of it getting placed on other relevant quality blogs giving you quality backlinks.
4) Images give your website more social shares
If your images are meaningful and attractive then you get more social shares and drive more traffic from social media.
If you share your blog posts on social networks like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Twitter then there are more chance of getting it shared further and get more traffic if your featured image is good.
Good images or info-graphics create more engagement on social media. Social audience prefer visual posts over boring text.
WordPress is a good platform to get ready to use tools for adding images to your website, optimize them for search engines and social networks. Give your website more exposure by making optimal use of images on your website. Learn why you should use WordPress to build your business website.
5) Images spread your message better
Your image represents your content and message on your website. On social networks the images are noticed first. Images can convey your message in one view, arouse interest in audience to click on image and land on the actual post on your website.
If you have chosen your images wisely then they will generate interest in users and compel them to read more about the topic and eventually you get one more visitor to your website.
6) Images make your topic easy to remember
People tend to memorize images better as compared to the text they read. Your website should make a point and represent your message. More influential the images more chances are for users to remember it.
You get more returning customers or visitors as they remember the images on your website. They may also refer your images further directly or through social shares or by word of mouth.
Images give free publicity to your business website and help promote your business in a better and economical way than any other medium.
7) Images help you build an emotional connect with audience
You get more loyal online audience and customers if you manage to connect with them emotionally. Emotional connect with audiences is a must for any brand.
Images play a major role to establish an emotional connect with your target audience. Single image is as good as 1000 words of text when it comes to emotional connections.
Images can make your audience feel happy. They feel more connected to your brand and get your message in a more clear way thereby giving you returning visitors and more sales and more subscribers.
How To Use Images On Your Business Website
Images can do wonders for your business website. But you should be very careful in using images because if they are not use wisely on your website then they can backfire and make you loose your visitors leaving a very bad impression.
Images can build your brand but at the same time they can destroy it completely. All your SEO efforts and hardwork can go in vain if you don’t use your images carefully.
Here are the important things to keep in mind while using images on your business website to get better results, generate more traffic and build an amazing brand which is loved both by visitors and search engines.
1) Images should complement your website colors
Colors too play a vital role in attracting website visitors and pursue them to give you a sale. If images are used which complement your website colors then the combination can do wonders. Read about color psychology here.
Images should go with the website theme. This means images used on the website should complement the color scheme. If not then they might simply look odd and mess up the complete website design
A good example of a combination of color and images is an website we have developed.
2) Images should be interactive
Interactive images means users should be able to do something with the images. Image can be clickable to see a larger version in a light box.
Or may be it shows a call to action with some text on hover. Or simple an image can be a part of a call to action.
More interaction an image can provide more user engagement it creates. Reduces the bounce rate
Here is a nice example of interactive image on a website.
On hover
On Click
3) Unleash the power of photo galleries
We always recommend all our client to include a photo gallery in the website.
Photo gallery is a good way to showcase large groups pictures or images and categorize them. This makes it easier for users to browse through.
Photo gallery is also a nice way to showcase your portfolio and present it beautifully to your clients and impress them.
An example of a photo gallery we have used in a website design we have made for our client who is into catering services business and partnered with us for website designing services in Delhi from USA.
4) Use images to catch attention
Images should always be catching attention otherwise images are of no use. Images can be use of people doing something relevant to your business in your business website.
People showing excitement about your service or looking happy with your product are some examples of catching attention of your online visitors and increase conversions.
Or may be your employees doing something. Here is another example of how we have done it for one of our client based in USA who is into heating and cooling services.
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5) Use captions in your images
It is a psychology that users tend to read the captions with images. It is another good thing to write some catchy captions for your images and display them right below the images on your website.
You should ask your website developers to include the caption along with images when the website is built.
It also gives you an opportunity to include your keywords in the captions which is good for the website SEO.
Here is an example of a viral news website we have built. This website is our own product which generates a lot of traffic.
6) Use alt tags in your images
Using alt tags in your website images is very important for the overall SEO of your business website.
Alt tags are meta content and always crawled by search engine bots. They are very critical for your website images to appear in image search results when someone is looking for your products or services online.
Alt tags for the images should contain keywords and present the message of your business.
Images without alt tags are of no use for search engines.
7) Optimize your images
High quality images at times are very large and heavy in their size. This can make your website pages load slow. Users normally leave a slow website in seconds. This may cost you loosing an interested customer or prospect.
In order for website page speed optimization, you must optimize and compress all of the images on your website.
You can optimize your images online for free by using tools like tinyPNG and reduce the size of the images considerably.
This will help your website pages to load fast and provide a better user experience to users on your business website.
8) Use images which connect emotionally
Arousing emotions can help you win a customer. Images can be a strong way to arouse emotions in your customers.
Use images of people relaxing if you have a spa website. Maybe you can use images of people smiling if you have a healthcare website.
We always recommend our clients looking for website designing company to use happy faces in the website. If you can show your product and service creating happiness then it will evoke same type of emotions in your customers and people will buy from you.
9) Use images in testimonials
Always use images in testimonials. Using images in testimonials on your business website will build trust and credibility for your brand.
Images will make your testimonials look more genuine and will leave a significant impact on your customer’s mind.
Building trust for a brand is very difficult and images used with testimonials can do it very easily for your business website.
10) Use images in your subscription boxes
If you are running a blog or looking to start one then your ultimate goal will be to get more and more subscribers for your blog.
This is the only way you can generate revenue from your blog. Driving traffic to your blog is not easy. It becomes more depressing if you get traffic and still no one subscribe to your blog.
Using images in subscription boxes can be extremely helpful in pushing your website visitors to subscribe to your blog.
As explained above use images in subscription boxes which connect emotionally with your website visitors and catch their attention.
Conclusion
You can use this article as a checklist on how to use images on your business website. Images are extremely important for the success of your blog or business website.
Using right images at right places is the key to get more sales or subscribers. Never use images just for the heck of using them.
Images which are not relevant to your business or images which do not give any message are of no use. It is a waste of time setting up those type of images on your website.
For more conversions always use nice optimized images at important places. This will not only give your more customers but also build the trust your brand is always looking for.
Images also give you a competitive edge and stay ahead of your competitors.
For more information on how to use images you can also contact our website specialists anytime.
Google Ranking Factors: Updated 2018
Ranking Factors in SEO: 50 Checkpoints
You must have heard about the influence of the ranking factors on the position of the Search Engine Result Page.
Ever wondered…
What are these SEO ranking factors?
There are more than 100 SEO ranking factors that push your website’s ranking towards top. Search engines like Google follows an algorithm with the combination of certain factors for ranking positions.
The term “Ranking Factors” labels the standards functional by search engines when assessing web pages in order to accumulate the rankings of their search results.
Most important Google’s SEO Ranking Factors
In this post we have listed almost all the important SEO factors that contribute to the search engine ranking factors.
1. How old is your domain.
This is still debatable.
But it is believed that the age of a domain does have an impact on Google’s search ranking factors.
2. Keywords in the domain.
When the targeted keyword is placed in the beginning of a domain it becomes a quality on-page SEO ranking factor for most search engines, especially Google.
3. Exact Match Domain or EMD impact on Google Search Rankings
Google’s EMD update made it very clear that sites which were initially ranking just because of their exact match of keyword in their domain will no longer happen.
The site has to be a quality site in order to rank in Google’s search results page.
4. Increase Google Page Rank with Country TLD extension
If you aim to improve your search engine ranking for a particular country then Top Level Domain extensions like .ca, .pt, .cn are great.
But remember
You will not reach a higher ranking globally by opting for Country TLD extensions.
5. Keywords are an important SEO ranking factor
Keywords are still one of the most important quality ranking factors in SEO. It is essential to include and more importantly begin the “title tags” with keywords.
But why?
Because the more far it gets from the beginning, higher are the chances of losing the weightage in ranking position.
Send more relevancy signals to the search engines by including the keywords in the header tags <h1> and <h2>.
6. The longer the content, the better you rank
Content that is longer in words tends to rank higher in SERPs than the short ones. It is well explained in this article here.
7. Distribute LSI Keywords in the content
Latent Semantic Indexing keywords help search engines to extract a more clear meaning for Homonym (similar sounding words with different meaning; break-brake) words.
Their presence can accelerate the SEO rankings.
8. Page Speed affects Google rankings
Page speed load time is an important Google SEO ranking factor. If your page load time is more than 5 seconds then you are losing out on rankings.
9. Duplicity in Content
This is one of the well-known yet poorly followed search engine optimization tips. If you publish similar content on the same website then you can come in Google’s radar.
So it’s better to avoid duplicate or faintly brushed up content on your website to increase search engine visibility.
10. Use Rel=Canonical properly
You can prevent Google from marking your pages duplicate by using the tag rel=canonical in an appropriate manner.
11. Optimize your Images
It is very important for website owners to optimize the images used on the site’s pages. Make sure to include the title, alt-text, description and caption.
Because Google cannot read the image as such, but can read the text associated with it.
12. Content Updates
For time-based searches (like month or year), Google Caffeine turns towards recently updated relevant content on the web.
Adding new information or removing an outdated one from the content adds a fresh essence to the content and makes it more reliable too. A regularly updated content has more thumbs-up than a non-updated page for search engine optimization rankings.
13. Outbound Linking
As per Moz, when you link to a relevant quality website then you are sending trust signals to the search engines about the relevancy of the content on your site.
Although multiple dofollow outbound links can harm SEO ranking of your website.
To illustrate more:
…if you have a page about “apple” and you are linking to other webpages related to “health”. Then Google will understand it to be a fruit and not a technology brand.
14. Internal Linking
The number of internal links on a website’s page shows the importance of that page over other less internally linked pages on the same domain.
Internal links support in spreading link juice a powerful SEO ranking factor about websites.
15. Original Content
If your content is copied from an already indexed page then it will not rank high in the Google’s SERP. Rather it will be placed in the supplemental index of Google rather than main index.
Calculate the supplemental index here.
However useful supplementary content like language translators, metrics converters, interest calculators, and more such supplements are an indicator of a webpage’s quality. And thus a Google ranking factor.
16. Multimedia adds value to ranking factors
Multimedia essentials like images, videos etc. act as a quality indication for Google which can positively impact your search engine rankings.
17. Don’t ignore broken links
If you have too many broken links on your website then Google will assume either you are not active on website or your website is not updated since long.
This can seriously harm your website’s ranking in search engines.
18. Keep the vocabulary simple
Write your content for the masses in an easy to read and understand manner. By doing this you increase your chances of ranking higher in the search queries.
Also
Use bullet points and numbers in your content to make it easy to read. Google pays more attention to such content.
19. Be careful of HTML errors and W3C validation errors
If your site has too many coding errors and is poorly validated on W3C then you might be in a risk zone. As it send a weak signal to Google about the site’s poor quality which in turn harm your ranking on Google.
20. Domain Authority
If we assume all the ranking factors to be balanced, then a page on higher DA will be ranked high in comparison to a page on lower DA.
It is advisable to increase your page’s domain authority for a hike in your page’s rank on search engines.
21. URL Structure
Keep the length of the URL short as a long URL can negatively impact the site’s visibility.
Also,
…place the URL’s you would like to rank higher, close to the homepage. By doing this you can increase the page’s authority.
22. Categories and Tags
These are very important ranking factors of search engine optimization. The category and tags on a page are a sign of relevancy which in turn is a ranking factor.
Always place the page/post in the related and relevant category and tag.
23. Sitemap Influences SEO Rankings
Websites which have many pages with multiple levels, a sitemap helps Google to crawl through the most important URLs marked by their priority values in the sitemap.
24. Parked Domains
The search visibility of Parked domains in Google is not much. Thus these domains do not get a preference in search engine rankings.
25. Valuable Quality Content
Content was, is and will always be the King.
If the content on the website offers no valuable information, or is exactly a copy-paste, or a thin affiliate site, then such webpages get negatively affected in terms of Google search rankings.
Regularly update your site’s content with fresh original information to secure a top position in Google SERPs.
26. Include a “Contact” Page
According to the General Guidelines for ranking by Google, it gives more value to websites which have a “Contact us” page.
27. TrustRank: important SEO ranking factor
You have to gain Google’s trust for your website if you want to rank higher in the search results page. You can get high TrustRank gaining more backlinks from high authoritative trust sites.
28. Site Architecture
A pyramid-shaped site structure is an ideal approach to head for SEO rankings. As it becomes easier for Google to crawl through your website’s main pages you, and hence rank them in SERPs.
29. Number of Web Pages
The higher the number of pages a website has, the lesser are its chances of being a thin affiliate site. It is not an authority factor alone, but a useful one.
30. Sitemap is a must
Sitemaps are very important to increase your site’s visibility as Google indexes your web pages easy and comprehensively through sitemaps.
31. Keep down the Downtime of your website
Downtime of your website (even for some hours) can negatively impact your site’s ranking. Ensure the up and running status of your website for a better search engine optimization.
32. Location of your site’s server
The location of your server can impact the geographical rankings of your website. Particularly for location specific searches.
33. SSL Certificate
Google uses SSL certification and HTTPS lock on a website as a ranking factor for SEO.
34. Privacy Policy
The mostly termed “boring” pages like Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Disclaimer are rather important authority and trust signal for Google. Include these pages in your website to rank higher.
35. Duplicate Meta tags
Duplicate content in a site’s meta title and meta description can do serious damage by bringing down the visibility of your site’s pages.
36. Breadcrumb Navigation
For a user friendly site it is important that your site has a proper breadcrumb navigation (see above image). So that the user and the search engine are aware of their location on the site.
37. Responsive Websites
Responsive websites get an edge over non-responsive sites in Google. Not only this Google has also started penalizing sites that are not mobile-friendly.
38. YouTube Videos
The videos on YouTube are given more weight-age in search engine results pages, may be because it is owned by Google.
39. Reviews
Reviews on authoritative sites like Yelp.com are one of the most significant ranking factors of Google’s SEO. As per Google, being bad to your customers in bad to your business.
40. Number of Linking Domains and Linking Pages
This is a one of most impact ranking factors in SEO, as evident from Moz’s chart below. The higher, the better.
The authority of the linking domain and linking pages is another factor for SEO rankings. Links from .edu, .org and .gov domains carry more value.
41. Social Sharing
Social sharing of a particular page induces the ranking of that page in search engines.
42. Dwell Time
Google pays special consideration to the Dwell Time of a website. If users find the content on your website useful and spend more time there then there are very good chances of higher rank of that page.
43. Likes, Shares and Authority of Social Accounts
The number of likes and shares from authoritative social accounts are likely to give a boost to the visibility and ranking of your business website.
Social sharing coming from popular websites will have more value than the profile with less followers.
44. Pop-up Ads
A site which has disturbing pop-up ads is considered a low value site and will hence rank low in search results.
45. Keyword Stuffing
As per Google’s guidelines overloading a web page with keywords for the purpose of diverting the SERPs is a negative practice and can result in penalizing your website.
A classic example of keyword stuffing would be:
We are an office furniture selling shop. Our office furniture quality is very strong. If you plan to buy office furniture then buy the office furniture from our office furniture selling shop.
46. Hidden links
Some webmasters play smart with Google by hiding the text and links in the content to increase the Google’s search rankings.
But, you cannot act smart with Google.
If you try to hide links by
- making it of same color as that of background
- or, by linking only a single letter
- or, by making it of a zero font
Then you are at loss for violating Google’s general guidelines for ranking factors.
47. Foul Redirects
If the reason for redirecting is genuine, like your website moved to a new address or if you merged multiple pages into one. Then there is no need to worry.
But if
The reason is fishy like, redirecting users to a completely different page than what was shown to the user in the search results page. Then my friend Google can get as harsh as de-indexing your website.
Be careful!
48. Toxic Links
Toxic links are negative ranking factors for Google SEO. If you have tried removing the toxic links manually and you have not succeeded yet.
Then you can use the Google’s disavow tool to remove the penalty on the victim sites.
49. Auto generated content
Google does not favor auto generated content. The content on your website has to hold value and meaningful information to rank in search engines.
But there are no short cuts to it.
You cannot create quality content by some software or by changing it to synonyms or any other similar activity.
50. Sudden Influx of links
Certain new websites that suddenly get huge number of links can get in the circle of Google Sandbox. Which can negatively influence the search visibility of your website.
Conclusion
The above Google ranking factors for SEO should be followed if you aim to reach for a higher rank in the SERPs.
Contact a professional SEO company who follows white hat SEO techniques, which may take longer to show results. But guarantees of following Google guidelines.
