The attention span of people online is going down at a very alarming rate. People today want to consume more information in less time as no one is willing to read a detailed 3000 words article anymore, unless the blog has images and infographics in it.
Adding images to blogs makes it easy to skim and comprehend, moreover, people tend to spend more time on such blogs. Hence, it is almost a necessity these days to add visuals in your blog to attract more visitors. Thinking of the same, we have come up with this article that will teach you how you can create images for your website without seeking anyone’s help.
Importance Of Images In terms Of SEO
When you write blogs for your website with images, charts, and infographics in it, not just will it increase your blog engagement but according to various studies, blog posts with images and infographics get a lot of social shares and backlinks. A post with a high number of social shares and backlinks tends to rank higher in SERPs(search engine result pages).
Apart from that, your images can drive more traffic to your blog from Google Images if you have added relevant Alt text to it. Thus, images are not there just for making your blog look presentable, but they hold a very significant role in your websites on-page SEO as well.
How To Create Images For Blog
1. Find The Images
The first step in creating graphics for your website or blog is to find the right images for it. You can create graphics by using a single image or by combining two or more images as per your requirement. To find images you can make use of Google Images, but most of the google images are protected by copyright i.e you can not use them in your blog without the permission of the owner of that image.
However, the good thing is that you can also find images that can be reused without violating copyright infringement. For that, you will have to go to Tools under the search bar on Google Images and select Usage Rights> Labelled for Reuse.
Now, all the images you see on Google Images will be available for reuse and you can use them legally on your blog. However, if you still don’t find the right images on Google then you can check free stock image websites like Pixabay and Pexels. You can also use paid image websites like Shutterstock and iStock for better results.
Note: When using an image from search engines and don’t know whether it is copyrighted or not, make sure you give the credit of the image to its owner just to be on the safer side.
2. Edit The Images
Once you have found the images that you can use in your blog, it’s time to edit them. For editing, you can use online tools like Canva and Picmonkey or offline tools like photoshop and Gimp photo editor. If you are editing images for the first time, then we recommend you to use online tools as they are easier to use and understand.
While editing the images or creating infographics make sure you use the right fonts and color scheme which matches your website. You can make use of free online tools like ImageLR to get color codes for matching color schemes of your website and the graphics you have created. If you feel any trouble editing images on Canva, then you can read this step by step guide from them, it will teach you the basics of designing, and you will be able to create cool graphics for your website within no time.
3. Resize and Compress The Image
Now once you have the image created, you can’t just upload it to your website. Well, you can but it’s not recommended because the image dimensions are not yet resized and it may not fit perfectly on your blog. Depending upon your blog theme the dimensions of the images can vary but the most ideal image dimension for a WordPress site is said to be 1200 x 628 pixels. You can crop and resize the image on your Windows PC with the help of Microsoft Paint, and on a Mac using the Paintbrush tool.
After resizing the image, you need to compress its size as well. It’s not mandatory but a good practice to follow in order to save some space on the server. Compressing image size also makes the website load faster which is a key SEO factor these days. You can use the free online tool TinyPNG to compress your images without losing their quality. I personally use this tool and it’s worth recommending.
Now once the image is resized and compressed you can now use it on your blog and website.
Conclusion
Now after going through this article you must have understood how important images are for the growth of your website, and how you can create them on your own without hiring a graphic designer.
With this, also understand that you should never overuse images on your blog, only use them when required and not just for sake of it. If you use irrelevant images in your blog then it will distract the readers and they might leave your blog right away. So to conclude I’d like to say that images are great tools for increasing your website engagement and overall performance provided you use them carefully.
