Dude, Blog Your Business!

Dave and I always stress the importance of using images in blogs, both for drawing in the visitor to read the post, and for SEO reasons.  (The image above was one I used for our Invest in Energy Blog client today). An interesting point came up in conversation the other day about the increasing use of hand-held devices such as PDAs and cell phones for accessing websites and blogs on the move.  It was stressed that images in blog posts can be annoying when trying to read them on such devices because the image files can be quite large and take a long time to download. And on a small screen you cannot see them that well anyway.

This is an interesting point and certainly something that blog owners increasingly need to consider.  While I would reiterate the importance of using images in blog posts, the blogger can make life easier for readers on all platforms by scaling and optimizing their images for quick download.  This is especially important if you are taking your own digital pictures for your blog (recommended).  These often come out at approximately  2000 pixels in size, with a file size somewhere around 2.5 Mb – that’s huge for the web.

Ideally, you need to scale the picture down to around 500 pixels wide and optimize the file size to around 100 – 150 Kb or so.   This is especially important for bloggers using developer-hosted blogs because free space on those is limited to around 3Mb – after that you pay a monthly fee.  Optimizing images is always good practice for anything on the web, even if just as a courtesy to your readers. If the software that comes with your digital camera isn’t completely up to the job – mine certainly isn’t – then something like Photoline has all the functionality you will ever need for only 59 Euros.

 
I was delighted to hear from Darren Stevenson of Darren Stevenson Photography LLC following a comment I placed in answer to a question on LinkedIn. Darren asked me to take a look at his blog - www.poppa-d.blogspot.com/ and let him know if there were any improvements I could suggest.

I have to say that, overall, Darren was very much along the right tracks with his blog. The one big plus that is often absent in a lot of blogs is that he has great images in both the sidebar and with every post. Being a photographer he is fortunate to have access to an unlimited number of his own images and, of course, images are a vital part of using his blog to market his photography business.

Probably the one single greatest bit of advice I could give him was that he could make far more of the SEO opportunities with his images. Dave and I have written about this in other posts – just click on the “Blogging Advice” link in the category menu, or “SEO” in the Tag cloud if you want to read the post – but suffice it to say images are a vital part of SEO in blogs – everyone needs to use them.

One of the things Darren had very much got right with his blog is the establishing of himself firmly within the context of the area (Arizona) where his business was located – what we like to call ‘geo-targeting’. If your business is firmly tied to a specific geographical area it is very important that visitors (potential clients), get a sense of you as a ‘local’ businessperson. In order to achieve that you need to talk/post about your activities within that context.

Blogging is a very powerful medium and a little knowledge can make an incredible difference to how successful your business blog is in terms of online marketing. That is what we are here for.

We always recommend to our business clients that they use images in their blog posts. Not only does it make it much more interesting for the reader, it makes the whole blog much more attractive and enticing, much more likely to encourage the casual browser to stay and explore deeper. However, images are also extremely effective SEO tools as well.
 
The two places you need to optimize for the search engines when it comes to images are the image file name and the alt tags. The file name is a great opportunity to use one or two relevant keywords. Instead of naming your image “pic1.jpg”, name it something useful. For example, I named the image for this post “blog_seo_tips.jpg” –  3 good keywords that could be picked up by the search engines. You can further enhance the SEO by filling in the alt=”*” tags in the html view – for example, “How images in blogs enhance SEO”. ALT tags are the things that describe the image, showing up as text as you mouse over the image itself. Search engines look for subject relevant text and these are two additional places where you can get those keywords found.

Images should always be relevant to the subject and should be used at at least medium size if not large. Thumbnail images should be avoided as they just don’t look right in the blog post, and large images are more likely to be perceived as important to the post’s textual content. It probably sounds obvious but you should also make sure that you use good quality images. Badly framed or blurry images will create a poor impression of your blog and by implication, your business. Also, always place the image at the top and center justify for large images, left justify for smaller images which will let the text flow around the right edge of the image. It is important to be consistent so that your blog has a uniform and professional look.

Finally, if you can, vary your images with the odd video. Find something relevant on YouTube – they are easy to embed into your blog and, although you don’t get to use alt tags with them, it does make it a more varied and interesting experience for your readers – and that, afterall is the most important aspect of any blog, business or otherwise!