How to find the perfect image for your content and how to ensure that your customers can find them online
We live in a visual culture and things that are bright, colorful and move attract attention. For this reason, when you are creating and uploading content to your medical website, it is important to include an image with your content. Chances are you don’t have time or the resources to create a new image for each article or blog you post. Luckily, there are numerous places on the web where you can find free images or high-quality paid images.
Ben Larcey has compiled a list of some of the most popular and easiest places to find stock photos. Most of his listings are for free images; however, some of the services are available at low cost. Here are a few examples of where to find free and paid images. For a more extensive list, read Larcey’s article here, or check out this handy list from our sister blog SEOe.com.
Free Images
- Wikipedia Public Domain Images—images that are in the public domain that you can search.
- Death to the Stock Photo—a number of images are emailed to you every month. The site is not set up for you to search for photos.
Paid or Attribution Required Images
- Snapwire—a fun concept where you create a ‘challenge’ and the artists will take photos and upload their best image. You choose and purchase the one you like the best.
- Yayimages—a searchable catalog of over 5 million images for 9.90/month
Making Sure You’re Found on the Web: Optimize Your Photos
Now that you’ve found the perfect photo to accompany your content, how do you make sure that your patients (both current and potential) can find your practice from your photo? Easy, you need to make sure that the photo is optimized to enhance search engine rankings.
Just as content (through keyword based web searches) receives traffic on the Internet, images can be located through image searches. Therefore, you need to make sure that you optimize your photos to handle web searching in order to pick up search traffic.
In order to do this, you need to make sure your image has the following information:
- Save your image file using one of the keywords from your content (i.e. the keyword that is most likely to give you a high ranking)
- Since the size of your image can have an effect on the time it takes to load, make sure the image isn’t so large that it takes too much time to load. Most people don’t have the patience for images that don’t load.
- Include alternative search terms to ensure that web spiders still locate your image if the search term isn’t exactly how you’ve saved it. For example <img src=”medical-office.jpg” alt=”Medical Office” />
To learn more about enhancing your medical office’s position in the search engines, or otherwise marketing your practice online, continue browsing our site or contact us today to discuss your goals.