Category Archives: Content Strategy

How to find the right content writer for your content writing needs

How to find the right content writer for your content writing needs?

This blog post will explain to you how to find the right content writer or the right content writing service for your business.

Once you know what sort of content you want to publish on your website or blog, the greatest dilemma that your content marketing campaign faces is, how to find the right talent for your content writing needs.

Typically, your search for a professional content writer may begin with the following activities:

Search on Google
Go through freelance websites
Search online forums
Mention the need on your website if it is a high-traffic website
Mention on your social media profiles that you are looking for a content writer
Look within your own organization
Put up an advertisement in the classifieds section

Why is it extremely crucial to find the right content writer?

The content that you publish on your website or blog is going to stay there for a long time. Whether you get 10 visitors or 1000 visitors or even 1 million visitors, they are all going to consume the very same content that has been written by your content writer.

Hence, it is very important to choose or find the right content writer for your content writing needs.

Your content writer is going to help you

Improve your search engine rankings
Improve your conversion rate
Enhance your brand presence on the Internet
Write case studies
Write white papers
Prepare social media updates
Prepare email campaigns
Write blog posts and guest blog post
Write informative articles for your website

It is through your content writing that people will recognize you and form an opinion about your business and ultimately, decide to do business with you, or with someone else. The right content writer can provide you high quality content on an ongoing basis.

High quality content means more business

So, high-quality content – good business; low-quality content – less business or worse, no business.

Personally I feel any web content writer with decent skills should be able to help you improve your search engine rankings provided you target the right keywords and you are ready to spend enough amount of money and time into regularly publishing unique content on your website or blog.

The problem is not SEO, the problem is the conversion rate.

The problem is often not search engine rankings.

The problem is your conversion rate. And the right content writer understands this.

How many people actually do business with you after coming to your website?

Although there are many factors that affect your conversion rate, content writing, or the copy on your website, is one of the most important factors.

A content writing service like Credible Content can give you content that can improve your conversion rate.

Hence, even if your online content writer is not able to improve your search engine rankings, if he or she can improve your conversion rate, that’s what you need.

You can get targeted traffic to your website in multiple ways, but if the traffic does not convert, nothing matters.

I don’t mean to say you should settle for a website content writer who is unable to improve your search engine rankings. In fact, an experienced and capable content writer should be able to achieve both for you:

Improve your SEO
Improve your conversion rate

It’s all about finding the right talent. How do you do it?

Jot down the following to settle on the right talent for your content writing needs:

How are the communication skills of the website content writer you are evaluating?

Communication skills of your content writer

Communication skills of your website content writer

Writing, after all, is all about communication. The ability to communicate the right message at the right time is more so important during online content writing.

Can your website writer communicate convincingly?

Of course, if you are not sure what exactly is communicative writing, it will be difficult for you to judge your writer, but go with your gut feeling.

How do his or her emails sound? Does he or she take care that there are no spelling and grammar mistakes in the emails he or she writes to you?

Does he or she articulate in clear sentences without unnecessarily using words?

Is he or she too pushy?

Does he or she seem to be agreeing to every possible condition just to get the job?

Is his or her writing style conversational?

Is there a consistency in the manner in which he or she has written his or her profile on the website and the way he or she writes emails to you?

Does he or she understand your business needs?

Does your content writer understand your business needs?

It may be important, or it may not be important whether a writer has some sort of expertise in your business field. Still, a professional, established content writing service can be invaluable to your business.

I get to write a lot on technology – web design, server management, programming protocols and Cloud technology.

So, you can say that I’m comfortable writing on technology-related topics and my clients don’t have to spend lots of time explaining the specifics to me. Even when I don’t understand certain concepts, I know how to look them up on Google and then write about them in my own language. You can say that if you want an experienced tech writer for your business, I’m the right content writer for you.

I’m the right content writer for you also because I have been writing content for websites since 2007 and in all these years I have written for different businesses, from fashion to real estate to cooking to advertising and marketing to healthcare business to network marketing to accounting to financial consulting to house maintenance, and more.

Nonetheless, recently a client approached me who needed some knowledge of finance for his content writer. Although I told him that I can easily write on financial matters, he was reluctant because he needed a writer who has been writing financial articles for a while. I forwarded his message to another writer.

As a professional content writer with lots of experience, I know when I am the right content writer for you or not. I’m not here to get your work by hook or by crook. If I feel I’m not the right match, I will either let you know that you should look for the right content writer for your business somewhere else, or I will try to find one for you among my own group of writers.

Go for someone who you think can deliver your content for your business need.

Can he or she write search engine friendly content?

SEO-friendly content writing

There are many ways you can do business on the web without minding much about Google and Bing, and in fact, I advise my clients not to put all their eggs in the search engine basket. But, a big source of targeted traffic to your website are going to be the search engines.

Your search engine rankings are based on the following:

The age of your domain.
The number of genuine incoming links to your website.
The quality and the authority-factor of the websites linking to you.
The quality of your content.
The formatting of your content.
The relevance of your content.
How easy it is to access your content.
The frequency with which you publish fresh content and update existing content.
The timeliness of your content.
The sort of buzz your content creates on social media platforms.

As you notice, after the first three factors, it is all about your content, and in fact, without your content, the search engines have nothing to rank.

Your content writer should be able to write search engine-friendly content.

Don’t confuse search engine-friendly content with stuffing keywords into your writing senselessly. This is counter-productive. More than doing good, keyword-stuffing can bring you irreparable harm. The search engines can ban you for life.

Think it this way: there is a reason Google is called “the search engine giant”.

The company uses innumerable brains to make sure that you cannot trick the search engine into ranking your content higher even if your content actually does not deserve to be ranked higher.

Once I read that at a particular time, 240 math PhDs are constantly tweaking the Google search algorithm so that only quality content comes up when people use the search engine.

Too many people spend lots of time and money on trying to “trick” Google.

Even if they spend half of that time and money on publishing high-quality content on their websites, they will get better results.

Anyway, find out if your website writer can write search engine-friendly content and your content writing service can improve your SEO.

What is search engine-friendly content?

Keywords must be strategically used in the title and the body.
Keywords must be a part of the overall content rather than being forced here and there just for the sake of using them.
Content must be authoritative: as much information should be packed as possible in a single link.
The content is formatted so that it is easier for the search engine crawlers to analyze the content: various parts of the content should be arranged under the appropriate headlines and with bulleted points to make it “scannable” and understandable.
Various sections of your website should be interlinked strategically. No need to repeat the same content again and again if it can simply be linked to (within your website).
The sentences must be very simple, straightforward and clearly-formed. A 6th standard student should be able to understand what has been written.

How active your content writer is on the Internet?

Is your content writer active on the Internet?

No, I don’t mean that you should check out whether your content writer regularly posts cute cat videos on Facebook or the pics of his or her breakfast on Instagram. You don’t want a content writer who whiles away his or her time like that.

What I mean is, is he or she actively contributing to his or her field through constantly publishing high quality blog posts, articles and social media updates?

This is not a necessity: maybe you have come across a content writer who is so busy that he or she only gets enough time to write for his or her clients and he or she never gets time to write otherwise. That’s fine. There are always exceptions.

My personal experience is, content writers who only want to write for their clients are generally not good content writers. Many writers who approach me for work are very stingy about publishing content to showcase their services. They just want paid assignments. This makes them desperate and this has a direct impact on their writing quality.

Again, this has been my personal experience because I am often working with other content writers too.

Content writers who don’t blog often, who don’t write articles and blog posts on different topics, even non-paying topics, aren’t very interesting writers. They are lazy writers. Even greedy. They won’t write a single extra paragraph just for the love of the craft.

The case scenario can be opposite too. Is your writer so busy working on his or her own stuff that he doesn’t turn in your assignments on time?

There must be some balance. When you search for your writer on Google, you should be able to find lots of blog posts, articles and social media updates from the writer telling you that he or she actively participates in discussions relevant to his or her field. This shows that he or she proactively tries to grow his or her skill and he or she is also communicative and interactive.

How are his or her writing skills?

How are the writing skills of your content writer?

The most important quality to have for a writer or a content writer – writing skill.

Although there might be different styles of writing and different writers follow different writing guidelines, there is wrong writing and there is right writing, and your writer must be able to distinguish.

The following must be impeccable:

Sentence formation
Spelling
Grammar
Flow
Vocabulary

If the language in which you want the content writer to write is not a strong point for you, initially you will need to get the writing reviewed by someone you can trust (someone who knows the language well).

When looking for the right service provider for your business, keep in mind that good writing abilities are very essential to being a good content writer.

When the writing is well, proficient and error-free, you seem professional and you show respect for your visitors. It matters what image they form of you and hence, it shows that you pay attention to every word that you publish on your website or blog.

Is your content writer going to stick around for your ongoing content writing needs?

Is your content writer going to stick around?

The more your content writer writes for you, the better he or she gets. This has been my personal experience.

Organizations and individuals don’t want to let go of me once I have been writing content for them for a few months (provided they need quality content on an ongoing basis).

Comfort level develops.

Your writer knows more about your business after a while. You also begin to trust him or her. Your website or blog begins to adopt his or her writing style.

Although one of the biggest benefits of outsourcing your content writing needs to a content writer or a content writing agency is that it is very easy to change your content writer, make sure that you settle with a writer who is going to stick with you for a long time.

How do you know that your content writer is going to stick around?

Frankly, there are no guarantees in life. But there are some signs that you can pick to make sure that the content writer you are hiring is going to write for you for a long time. Some of them are:

If you contact your content writer from a freelancing website go through his or her profile and see for how long he or she has been writing content.
If you are contracting a content writing agency like Credible Content, just check for how long the person or the group of people have been providing content writing and content marketing services.
As mentioned above, check if your content writer is serious about his or her profession and if he or she continuously writes articles, blog posts and social media updates about his or her profession (that is, content writing).

Again, there is no guarantee. A company can go down no matter how impressive its website is, and a lone freelancer providing his or her content writing services from a freelance website may go on providing content writing services for years.

Conclusion

Whether right now you believe it or not, quality content is as important for your website as the web design itself.

Most of the entrepreneurs don’t realize that due to lack of quality content their websites don’t convert well and after a few months or after a couple of years, they have to wrap up their businesses. They think their idea was not good or people didn’t understand what they were trying to deliver.

The problem, more than 99% of the cases, is with content. They either underestimate the value of a good content writer or they don’t even realize that they need high quality content for their websites.

Note: Most of the images above are from https://unsplash.com

Improve SEO of web pages and blog posts with higher engagement levels

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Improved search engine visibility of web pages with higher engagement levels

On web pages and blog posts with higher engagement level, people stay longer. For example, if someone stays more than 30-40 seconds on a web page or blog post on your website, this web page or blog post has a higher engagement level compared to web pages and blog posts that people leave within five seconds.

A point on this NewsCreed blog post on content marketing KPIs caught my attention (although, all the points are worth reading):

Some articles may receive many pageviews but have low engagement rates, which indicates that you may want to revise those pieces to capture people for longer amounts of time. Other stories may have low pageviews and high engagement, indicating that you should reallocate distribution resources and re-optimize them for SEO to get those pieces in front of more people.

This makes great sense, and although it is a natural thing to do, we often ignore such steps.

You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to know how much time people are spending on individual web pages and blog posts on your website.

Your statistics give you lots of insight. There might be many web pages or blog posts that get lots of traffic, but people don’t stay on these web pages or blog posts for long.

In terms of SEO, these web pages or blog posts might be great, but they are not performing much in terms of eliciting a positive response from your visitors.

I repeatedly mention on my blog that traffic doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t get you business. Without business, more traffic is just ego massage or an illusion.

There might be many web pages or blog posts that don’t get much traffic, but when people land on these web pages or blog posts, they stay there longer. When they are on these web pages or blog posts, they even feel encouraged to explore other parts of your website or blog. This tendency of these web pages or blog posts helps you increase your conversion rate.

So, shouldn’t you try to get more traffic to these web pages or blog posts? You should.

If you have lots of web pages and blog posts on your website, prepare an Excel spreadsheet (or Google spreadsheet) and enter all the URLs you would like to track, over there. If you are using WordPress to manage your website, there is a nice plug-in that allows you to make a list of all the URLs in your WordPress database.

Some study of Google Analytics can tell you how you can find out how much time people are spending on your web pages and blog posts.

Once you have discovered that there are many web pages and blog posts that have a higher engagement level but don’t get much traffic, you can start promoting these web pages and blog posts.

Note down their current rankings, traffic and the amount of time people are spending on them in separate columns of the spreadsheet.

You can start with trying to improve their search engine rankings.

How to improve the SEO of web pages and blog posts with higher engagement levels?

Do you feel that if you tweak the content of web pages and blog posts with higher engagement levels may bring down their engagement levels?

Sure, this can happen, and this is where an experienced content writer can help you.

Anyway, as long as you are clear about why these chosen web pages and blog posts have a higher engagement level, you can optimize the content to increase their search engine rankings without meddling with their current engagement level.

You will need to be patient. My website gets crawled almost daily, and even multiple times a day sometimes. This way, I can find out quickly whether certain changes have had some sort of impact on their search engine rankings or not.

That might not be the case with your website. If it takes a while for Google to crawl and index your new and updated links, then you will need to wait and see how your recent changes are improving SEO of your chosen links and how it is affecting the engagement levels.

Make small changes. You must have clear idea of what keywords and search terms bring targeted traffic to these web pages and blog posts. See if you can incorporate more instances of these keywords and search terms into your existing content.

Maybe you can include a couple of more points with headings having your keywords?

Maybe you can increase the number of words?

But don’t add text just to increase the number of words; have something relevant to say. Make sure that you are adding value rather than creating extra noise to increase the size of your web page or blog post. This will cause more harm than good.

If right now you have got nothing to add, then don’t add. Do some research. Do some more reading. Take more time. This is not some job that you should do in a hurry.

Make a list of changes that you would like to incorporate and then wait for the new data to emerge in the Google Analytics dashboard.

As a content writer my advise would be to make very small changes in the existing text and then if possible, add more text where the original text ends. This way, the material that gives you a higher engagement level won’t be pushed down or diluted.

You can also promote links with higher engagement levels directly without resorting to improving their search engine rankings. You can encourage people to link to these web pages and blog posts. You can link to them from your own LinkedIn, Quora and Medium posts. You can repeatedly share them on social media. You can frequently share these links through your mailing list.

The string of thoughts that made me write this post was triggered by the suggestion that one should try to improve the SEO of web pages and blog posts that enjoy a higher engagement level so that more people can come to these web pages and blog posts, to get you even higher engagement level and consequently, improve your conversion rate.

7 Features of Successful Content Marketing Plan

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Creating a successful content marketing strategy

Guest post

There are a number of companies and businessmen that have created content marketing plans with little success. A number of possible reasons exist for why a content marketing campaign does not hit the intended goal. This could be because the content lacks quality, or the wrong type of content is used.

In this article you’ll learn the top tips for a successful content marketing plan. Therefore, you’ll avoid the common mistakes of others that have failed before you. With the list of tips mentioned below you’ll realize that implementing a successful content marketing plan can be a straightforward process.

Understand the audience

It’s important to figure out who your audience is and cater the content to them. For example, consider the type of problems they have, what kind of hobbies they take part in and their financial status. The more information you can find out about the demographics of your audience the more relevant the content will be.

Writing content that the audience can relate to allows for high rates of engagement. They are more likely to stick around to the end of the blog post and see the call to action.

Call to action

The point of content marketing is to generate new leads for your business. However, without a CTA the conversion rate for each piece of content is going to be minimal. You need to include the CTA in a variety of locations. For example, if you’re trying to get new subscribers to your email newsletter, then at the end of every piece of content tempt the viewer to sign up.

You can also have the CTA in the middle of the content if it’s in the flow of the writing. This might increase the conversion rate of your content marketing campaign even higher.

Solve a problem

The type of content you put out should aim to solve a problem for the audience. Not every piece of advice that you give should be behind a pay wall. By offering free and helpful information the customer is more likely to buy from you.

For example, if your website is about weight loss, then you could give advice on how to avoid putting on weight during a vacation. Actionable advice that’s targeted is always great for a content marketing strategy.

Consistent output

Regardless of how great your content is, an infrequent posting frequency will not work. Audiences expect regular content to digest – this ensures they will be coming back for more – even expecting it before it arrives.

The best approach is to send out daily content so that followers have a reason to visit your website on a daily basis. Once you have built up a large library of content you’ll also receive a large volume of traffic from the search engines.

Measure the performance

To understand what’s working and what isn’t, the performance of content should be measured. A breakdown of different statistics for every piece of content should be noted and organized. This includes the bounce rate, number of new subscribers, traffic and social shares.

Over time you’ll begin to see a pattern regarding what type of content receives the highest amount of attention. This means you can increase the ROI of your content strategy by focusing on what works. Before coming to conclusions ensure the amount of data gathered represent a decent sample size. Perhaps 1,000 visitors are enough to see how well a piece of content is performing.

Optimize for the search engines

If you are going to create content, then you might as well make the most of it by optimizing for the search engines. The common SEO principles to adhere to is the use of relevant keywords, optimization of meta tags and backlinking to other pages of your website within the content.

The last point is SEO friendly and it also improves the usability for the end user.

Repurpose your content

Working smarter always outperforms working harder. With that thought in mind repurposing your content is a great idea. For example, after writing a blog post you can use a portion of the content for an email or social media post.

This ensures that you are able to make the most of each piece of content created. You can then add a link to the original piece of content if they wish to read the entire piece.

Conclusion

The combination of the 7 tips for a successful content marketing strategy can increase the profitability of your campaign. You’ll see that by using these common marketing tactics the process is simplified. You can even outsource the entire operation to professionals.

Ensuring that your content marketing strategy hits targets is important to the overall success of your business. A well-implemented strategy can be the difference between achieving a consistent flow of many customers, and struggling to get any at all.

Do you know you can improve your CTR by 200% by tweaking your title?

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Improve your CTR with web page and blog post titles

Your web page and blog post titles are very important. I have lost a new client who insisted that I create titles for his blog posts for the same amount he was paying for writing the blog posts. The titles are so important that I charge extra for coming up with them.

Your web page and blog post titles are so important that they come under content marketing and content strategy because they can pretty much define the direction of your entire content marketing approach.

What are your title tags and why they are important?

Although your page heading and title tags can be the same, they can also be different. The heading is something that you enclose within <h1> and </h1>.

The title tag is something that you enclose within <head><title></title></head>.

Both are important. It is your heading, or the headline that hooks people to your web page or blog post when they come to your link. But, on search engine result pages, it is your title tag that matters.

It is your title tag that appears as a hyperlink when people search for your business:

Web page title as hyperlink in search results

Your web page and blog post titles are not just important for CTR (click-through ratio), they are also important for your SEO.

Google re-ranks your content according to your CTR. If your appearance in the search results does not attract many clicks, Google lowers your ranking for that link. If it attracts more clicks, it increases your rank for that link.

This blog post on Seige Media gives an in-depth analysis of how to test which web page and blog post titles perform the best through A/B testing, with the help of Google Search Console (previously known as Google Webmasters Tools). The writer also says that if you improve your title, you can experience a click-through increase of 20-200%.

Good web page titles can increase your CTR by 20-200%

A/B testing, as explained in the above link, can be a time-consuming exercise but it is worth your effort if you really want to make sure that you create optimized web page and blog post titles for maximum CTR.

It basically involves

coming up with the best title you can think of in the beginning,
publishing your web page or blog post with that title,
and noting down when your link begins to appear in the search results.

This is assuming that you are using Google Search Console to track your search engine appearance and your clicks.

Let things happen for two weeks.

Start noting down values such as number of clicks, click-through ratio and impressions for that particular link in the past two weeks.

Then, change the title and resubmit the link. Make sure the link has appeared in the search results.

Repeat the above process after two weeks.

This way you can create a detailed analysis of how various titles perform.

How do you write web page titles and blog post titles for maximum CTR?

Aside from the main keywords in the search terms that you should use within your title, the intent is also very important. What moves people to click your link?

The most commonsensical way of knowing what matters the most to people is, addressing their main concern within the title.

If you are looking for a blog writing service, then obviously something about a blog writing service is going to attract you towards a certain link.

But you are not just looking for a blog writing service, you are looking for a blog writing service that can help your business in a certain way.

This is where longtail keyword optimization can help you. Try to pack as much information as possible without making things too complicated.

“Blog writing service” may get me a good CTR, but “blog writing service for my car repair service” may get me even better CTR.

So, if people have a question, provide an answer. If people have a problem, provide a solution. If someone asks for “how many?”, give him or her “these many”.

Neil Patel suggests that you can use emojis in your titles to improve your CTR. This is something I didn’t know. Of course, if all the links on the search engine result page are without emojis and there is a single link that is with emojis, people will tend to click it.

Neil also suggests that mention numbers when you are creating titles for your blog posts and web pages.

“77% increase in CTR after this” gets more clicks than “awesome increase in CTR after this”.

Be more specific when writing titles

This Hubspot blog post on creating web page and blog post titles people cannot resist clicking suggests that you make your titles very specific. For example, if your web page contains an interview, then mention it somewhere in the title. If it contains a podcast or infographic, mention it. The post claims that titles that contain specific information that says exactly what the web page or the blog post contains get 38% more clicks than those titles that don’t.

The Hubspot post also has some rules of thumb on how to come up with clickable titles. Even small things matter.

Some title formats that always work

“How to” titles seem to work quite well, especially with search engine and social media users:

“How I increased my website traffic by 200% with just this simple SEO trick”

The title clearly tells that you are going to reveal what SEO trick you used that increase your traffic by 200%. Such titles draw lots of clicks.

“10 ways you can sell your old mobile phone online within 24 hours”

“Painstakingly learnt 25 content marketing lessons that are 100% failsafe”

“If this method doesn’t give you an 8-hour peaceful sleep, nothing will”

“Why” and “how” seem to do quite well because they trigger a sense of curiosity and also provide some valuable information in a concrete form.

Conclusion

Your web page and blog post titles need to cater to a strong desire, or need. They should also give concrete information. Something like “Get 1500 leads in 3 weeks” will always be more convincing than “Get more leads faster”.

The importance of image link building

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Using images for link building

Some of my clients have observed that in my blog updates I am paying special attention to the quality of the images I use these days.

Although normally they are a mash up of images that I find in Google images and other places, these days I try to make them as unique as possible by combining multiple images and text.

Not everybody can create nice-looking images, and this is where image link building can help you.

Have you ever noticed that when people use an image from another website or blog, they normally mention the “source”?

This gave me an idea. I normally find it very difficult to approach other publishers and bloggers (doesn’t mean I don’t) for backlinks.

As you know, people don’t go on distributing their backlinks. They either really need to know you, or you need to offer them something really compelling, or something they cannot resist linking to.

Being a content writer, writing blog posts comes easy to me, but most of the time, either I’m writing for my clients, or for myself.

Somehow, I cannot bring myself to writing blog posts for other websites and blogs. At least not right now. Maybe in future, when I will feel that my own blog and website have had enough of my writing, I will start writing for other blogs and websites.

Most of the backlinks that I currently have come from a few news websites because I also write journalistic articles and opinion pieces. But that is not sufficient.

I like creating images. This is not my profession and I don’t do this for money, so maybe I enjoy it more. But that’s beside the point.

Many bloggers and online publishers are constantly looking for good images. Major search engines like Google and Bing have dedicated image search sections. There is a complete website dedicated to curating images: Pinterest.

Talking of Pinterest, if you want people to pin your images try to make them as relevant as possible to your blog post or web page. This will get you more clicks from Pinterest.

What I’m trying to say is, there is a big world that revolves around images. This opportunity can be tapped into. You can encourage people to link to you due to the quality of your images.

Will give you a small example: Recently I published a web page dedicated to my blog content writing services. Actually, I have created multiple web pages, but I was just testing whether the images that I have used with these web pages show up in the image search results or not.

Just to make sure that Google was giving me unbiased results I used the “incognito mode” of the browser.

When I searched for “blog content writing services” on google.com I found the following images from my website:

Google image search results for the phrase blog content writing services

I hovered the cursor over the image thumbnail and this is why the various thumbnails are showing image dimensions and the website link.

There are other images too, but I haven’t shown all the images here.

Before the weekend I also published “6 Indisputable Benefits of Content Marketing” and I created two graphics for it. If you search for “benefits of content marketing”, you find both these images in the image search results:

Google image search results for the phrase benefits of content marketing

How to use images for link building?

When you are creating or mashing up images for your website or blog, think from the perspective of a person who would one day like to use your image.

Does it offer some useful insight? A statistic, for example?

Many people creating presentations and slides will like to use your image with data.

After you have created the image, do you think people would like to use it?

This brings to my mind that with my images, I use my website link to make sure that one, people know that from where the image is coming, and two, they don’t use the image as their own. I’m not sure if this is a good tactic or not because if I include my link, it may deter them from using the image and linking to my website as “source”.

Anyway, the idea for this present blog post that I’m writing about the importance of using images for link building, came to me when I was going through my Twitter timeline and came across an update from Moz.

They publish weekly videos titled “Whiteboard Friday” in which they give very useful SEO tips.

In their latest Whiteboard Friday video, they have talked about how to use images for link building.

Aside from creating very striking and useful images, I think you should also aim for improving your search engine rankings in the image search results.

I have recently started following these points while using images on my website and blog:

Name the image file with a descriptive phrase. For example, if I’m creating a blog post about content marketing, some way or the other, I try to make sure that the phrase “content marketing” appears within the name of the image file.
Use the .PNG format when saving the images. This will allow you to create very light images without losing their quality and sharpness. This is something that I discovered just recently. Google prefers the .PNG format.
Describe the image using the ALT tag. Never misguide – the text in the ALT tag must represent what is being shown in the image.
Use image captions. This is also something that I have just started using a few days back and this has shown a marked improvement in my image search engine rankings. Caption is an HTML tag that you can enclose your image in and in the caption text, try to use your keyword. Again, use the caption text contextually, not irrelevantly.
Use appropriate text around the image. Although technology these days allows computers to read text with images and there are many algorithms that can tell what is inside the image (a tiger jumping over a fallen tree, for example), the image ranking algorithms still depend upon the information existing around the image to make out what the image represents.

These are the few measures you can take to make sure that your images enjoy better search engine rankings.

Rankings are important. No matter how good your images are, if people are not able to find them, they’re not going to help you in image link building.