Travel blogging is about more than just words. Describing the beautiful places you go to, the cultures you experience and the adventures you take part in is undoubtedly necessary and valuable. It allows you to tell a story with all the related details that enables readers to follow along as if they were experiencing it themselves.
What bloggers should never neglect, however, is the importance of accompanying photographs. In all spheres of blogging, whether it’s travel or even more niche topics like cooking, having photographs is one of the most critical components when piecing together good content.
Photography can change the entire way a page looks and feels. Photographs placed between paragraphs, act as anchor points for readers to navigate through posts and provide a sense of structure and continuity. It also goes a long way to making your blog look professional.
Readers are much more likely to leave a poorly-constructed site with grainy photos than they are one with quality content and well-composed images. It’s therefore crucial to ensure that your photos are professional and high quality in conjunction with well-written articles as part of your overall content strategy. Acquiring high quality photos is its own challenge.
But as a travel blogger you should always have a travel camera for your own photos. However, if you’re not able to use them for whatever reason, there are also a number of databases online that provide free images that can enhance a post.
Blog photography is also extremely important when it comes to optimizing your blog so that it can be found on search engines such as Google more easily. This requires changing the size, caption and alt text of the image so it’s seen by Google’s crawlers.
Naming and describing your photo means whenever someone searches for the words that correspond with your photo’s name, the photo is much more likely to appear on Google than a generic title assigned by your camera. The same is true with your alt text – or text alternative – the name your browser assigns to images when it can’t render them properly.
For alt text naming, simply describe the image as you normally would in simple and plain terms. For example, if you have a photo you’ve taken of a beach in Barcelona, you might name it Barcelona-beach-2017.jpg with the alt tag “Barcelona beach 2017”. This will ultimately add SEO value to your blog and help its ranking on Google and other search engines. For more information on SEO optimization for images, check out this site.
