Adding an image to every blog post you put out is one of the fundamentals of SEO – search engine optimization. And SEO in turn is what gives your blog an audience.

Anamnesis, please!

I started doing a bit of learning of, and perhaps more importantly, taking action to amend this blog. Long story short; there’s plenty of things to do here. I got into a situation where sitting atop of 400+ articles, written during a period of around 9 years, got me a constant background traffic. I felt however that I had overlooked a few very essential and easily implementable improvements.

Dr J – Still in it…

If you start digging into SEO, you’ll discover – probably quite soon in the path – a kind of dark aura around the theme. Search Engine Optimization is something that I’m definitely not an authority in. However, I like to combine a bit of knowledge about SEO with generic site usability (UX). What I love to do is:

• research,
• apply,
• ..and tell the story

That’s what blogging has always been to me. It’s a kind of chimera between story telling, being a “digital journalist” for a moment, and getting an echo out of the experience.

Today I was listing the articles in WordPress backend (the ‘Admin’ side of my blog).

I noticed that very few of my blog articles had images. An image can make a significant impact.

Reasons for including that image?

Having an image in a blog post is an aesthetic issue, and an image can whet the appetite for reading. Ok – let’s face reality: You don’t want to use those boring stock photos. You don’t have the time to start running around with a camera. So there must be some good justifications for going the extra mile and adding an image. Which brings us to consider this: perhaps one of the strongest causes for the inclusion of an image in a blog post is that the image serves as quite a powerful search “anchor” – something that appears in search results, and can result in a click-through. So to put things simple: an image can be vital element in helping exposing your other content to the readers.

One of the most useful and insightful aspects to include in any SEO process is You: your own thoughts, actions and anything that goes in between. That is, think what you do while ordinarily using the web. How do you search? What makes you finally take an action while in the search results listing? Is it the way a header has been written, or the contents of the header? Or – is it that image that entices? Or is it a familiar author name – ie. trust?

Happy writing!