Images are crucial
to have on posts, pages, excerpts, listings, for social media sharing, for every part of having an online presence, both within your blog site and out on the web. Visuals rate highest in social media sharing; they get the best ranking and therefore reach on Facebook. Which means that Facebook will publish your post link with a picture over and above one that’s just a link. So you’ve got to have at least one image with each post.
Chances are, you’ll be pulling this image off your harddrive on your computer in order to get it into WordPress. Whether you’re using a photo you’ve taken, an image you created, or something you’ve purchased from iStockPhoto or the like, that image is either on your harddrive, a disk, or a thumbdrive. Below is the video tutorial which explains how to get your image from your computer into your post or page.
Always add a Featured Image
so that when your page or post is shared, that thumbnail will grab people’s attention and get them to click on your link! Which brings up another point: make sure that image is compelling, and compelling even if it’s small. Another common use for the Featured Image is in your theme — category pages, widgets, read more links, and other features of advanced WordPress sites all use the Featured Image in their design, again for the purpose of appealing to the 98% of visitors who are visually-focused. It’s faster and more fun to scan a page based on images rather than slogging through all the words! (a quick reminder in the same vein: use Headings to emphasize certain parts of your text — again makes it easier and more fun for the reader).
Which brings us to SEO (Search Engine Optimization):
Both headings and images are useful, not-to-be-overlooked SEO tools. SEO is a game; you get certain rules and opportunities in which to use a very limited number of tools to maximize your chances of winning. So use them! Headings hold SEO weight; the higher the number heading (1 through 6), the more weight Google and the other search engines give to the text that is in the heading. It’s a declaration of what’s important, in your view, on that page. Google will take your word for it, at least at first. So use it. Images are even more versatile for SEO — you can pack a lot of keywords into the image alt text area, the title of the image, caption, description, and all of it helps.
[hive]
