SEO and Sites With Images

Posted by EssexMax on 4 March 2013 under Search Engine | 2 Comments to Read

Thanks to Laurence for asking the following:

“I’m wondering about how business websites would rank if their webpage predominantly comprises of images. What does a business do if they have a website with not much textual content?

Am I correct in thinking in that situation a business should have an integrated blog in order to increase the amount of keywords are within their webpage? I’m beginning to plan on launching a lead-generation website which will probably not contain much in the means of textual content.”

Sites without much text

Sites that are are rich in relevant text tend to do better than those that don’t have much in the way of text. However, sites will little text can still do well, especially in the following circumstances:

• If there aren’t many competitors, a “thin” site can do OK in search engine rankings (it might be a struggle though
• If the site doesn’t rely on Google or Bing for its traffic, then SEO doesn’t matter too much (perhaps using social networking)

If you have a site that wants to get noticed by the search engine, then having rich text about the subject material, and getting links from relevant sites is key.

Things to do

If your site is all about images, and you have little text, then there are a things to do:

• Make sure that all of your images have good ALT tag descriptions, so that Google knows what they are
• Make sure the Meta tags, headers and whatever text you have on the page is accurate and relevant
• Consider adding as much text as you can – if you can’t add it on the page itself for aesthetic reasons, then somewhere else on the site is a good idea

In summary, it is possible for sites without much content to rank well, but only where the site has done a good job of telling the search engines what the page content is about, and typically where there isn’t a lot of competition from sites that have lots of rich, relevant content.

Your suggestion 0f having a frequently-updated blog with relevant content alongside the image-heavy part of the site is certainly a good idea for giving the search engines a reason to keep visiting you. If that’s not an option, and your site doesn’t need to rely on texts or search engines, then you m,ay need to look at other ways to get visitors, such as social media or advertising.