Images vs Text, which works best for SEO?
Posted on: March 7, 2014
At first glance, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) looks quite a simple online marketing strategy, however it’s not that easy as it seems. There are so many aspects involved in SEO that can affect the rankings of your site that you can even lost track of what you’re doing, what you should do and what sort of techniques would work for you. Moreover, while you’re doing SEO on your site along the way many questions arise in your mind and our topic for today is also going to discuss one of those things, whether images work best or text or may be mixture of both. Well, keep on reading till the end to know more about it.
SEO with Images
When you optimize your site/post’s images for search engines, technically there’s not much you can do about it except adding ALT tags by using the main keywords you’re targeting and then cross your fingers for better results. However, if your site totally relies on images then it can get a bit harder to do effective SEO because in general, on-page SEO focuses more on text than images. Sites with mostly images or memes etc. can’t really do much about it because they are primarily based on images.
So, at the end with images – you just have three things to optimize:
- Alt tags
- Description and title
- Caption
And then leave rest to the search engines and hope for the best.
SEO with Text
Those alt tags, descriptions and captions you give for your images – they are made by using text. So, it seems that even while doing SEO with images you can’t really ignore the words. Moreover, texts are much simpler to optimize as compared to the images. All you have to do is know your niche’s good keywords and write around your site’s main theme while adding those keywords with high quality content.
On a more advanced level, you conduct a proper research before writing any content and then come up with something that is not only friendly and useful to your site’s users but it’s equally good for search engines. Either way when your final copy will be ready – you’d be certain to some extent that the content is well suited for humans as well as machines.
Who’s the Winner?
Since the beginning it was none other than the text, so yes words are the winner here. However, the best way of doing SEO is to create a mixture of both. Normally, most of the posts already contain images and you could easily optimize those images along with the text to increase the chances of getting more traffic through this technique.
So, don’t hesitate to throw in a couple of images along with the text and you’re good to go. Just make sure you choose appropriate images and write high quality content.
