Those of you who are old enough may remember a time when we used to joke about people buying the Sun newspaper for the pictures and the Times to show how clever they were because they understood all the big words. Well those days are gone but there is still something to be learned from that sort of thinking.
Recently I have been adding free listings to Tenerife Pages and other sites, using peoples websites or Facebook pages to gather information for their links. I was stunned to realize that well over half the pages I looked at had very little text to say what it was they were actually trying to market themselves as.
So lets start with the 2 main reasons you want a mention on other websites or on social media.
- People seeing that ‘advert’ get to know what you offer and hopefully contact you.
- A link to your page or site raises the importance of it so you get closer to the top when people do a search on Google, Facebook etc.
Example from Google
Take a simple example: Someone is looking for a Removals in Tenerife. It’s not enough for you to simply say you do removals – what sets you apart from all the others? People search for dozens of different phrases (keywords), removals, man with van, move to tenerife from uk, cheap removals, quote for removals, local removals, pet transport, house removals, small removals and those are only a few of the search terms.
Images
Example from Facebook
If your site or page relies totally on images then it’s difficult to do effective SEO (Search Engine Optimization) because in general, SEO focuses more on text than images. With mostly images or memes etc. can’t really do much about it.
With images on websites you just have four things you can optimize:
- file name (url)
- Description and title
- Caption
- Alt tags
Then leave rest to the search engines and hope for the best. With Facebook you are in the lap of the gods!
Text
Alt tags, descriptions and captions on your images are only useful because they use text. So even while doing SEO with images you can’t really ignore the words. Words are much easier to optimize than images. All you have to do is research your keywords and write adding those keywords with high quality content.
Images aren’t helpful unless you write something to go with them. Well written posts can be shared (and hopefully re-shared) and give you some useful ‘link juice’ for your page. Re-shared content, images and memes will help the originator but it will not help YOU much at all.
The Bottom Line
From the start of the internet, words are the winner here. The best way of doing SEO is a mixture of both. Normally, most posts already contain images so optimize those images with text to increase the chances of getting more traffic and higher positions in searches.
The ratio of text to images depends on who you are trying to reach. Statistically younger people like images and older people prefer to read something rather than just look at pretty pictures and memes. It’s a balance!