Can’t think of anything to say? Let a picture speak for you.
In fact, you should try to use photos with most or all of your blogs. They draw attention and illustrate your point. In the cleaning industry, especially, before and after shots can be extremely powerful.
However, from an SEO standpoint, photos and videos do little good unless you identify them appropriately so that search engines know what your readers are looking at. To maximize your SEO with photos, implement the following:
- Label your photos appropriately. Rather than “pic1.jpg” name it something that will benefit you: e.g., “eclean blogging.jpg” or something along those lines.
- Use a caption that incorporates some key terms: “eClean Magazine provides cleaning contractors with marketing tips for photo use in ta cleaning blog.”
- Use a title, alternate text and description with SEO terms. In other words, any place you can put key words to describe your photo, do so. (We’ll get into keywords next week.)
Where to find free photos
It’s always smart to take plenty of photos on cleaning projects, which can be used with your blog. However, there may be times when you need a totally different type of picture. Not only is it technically illegal to pull copyrighted photos that you find on other sites, Google frowns upon it as well. There’s really no reason to pull copyrighted photos when there are plenty of free photos that you can legally use. Here are a few places to find them:
Stock.Xchng – for some photos you have to notify the photographer of use; others you don’t. All are free.
Flickr — look for photos with a “creative common license.”
