Generating a steady stream of backlinks is essential for any website that wants to maintain its high SEO score. But while most website owners today have gotten pretty good at encouraging backlinks to their content, many are still seriously underutilizing images as a tool for doing so. Below are five simple ways that you can use image-based content to generate backlinks consistently.
Know Who You Are Targeting
Whenever you are courting other websites for links to your own content, it is important that you know exactly who you are targeting and why you have chosen to target them. Whether you are linking back to individual pages on your website or to specific images, not all links are going to have the same value.
In general, target the same people that you would target for regular backlinks. However, you may well find that some of the websites that you want to target will prefer visual content in the form of images. If there is a website on your target list who is particularly well suited to share your images, it is worth prioritizing them over the others.
Prioritize Your Most Popular Content
If you are lucky, you will already have a backlog of popular images to draw from and use in order to generate backlinks. If this is the case, and you have archives overflowing with images that are still relevant and usable today, a significant part of the difficult work will already be done for you. However, most people are not going to be so lucky and will be looking to, at least in part, generate new images to use as the basis for the next backlinks drive.
Regardless of the format that your past content exists in, it is always worth examining it carefully in order to establish exactly what it is that makes it so popular with your audience. If you can crack this code and work out precisely what it is that your audience responds well to, you will find it much easier to craft material that resonates with them.
If your previous content is all text-based and image-based content is going to be new to you, a logical starting point is still with your most popular text content. We will talk in more detail later about how you can use images to summarise the content and attract interest in the original articles.
Make Your Content Sharable
When someone else chooses to link back to your content, they are in a sense sharing it with their audience. When we think about sharing content, we usually do so within the context of social media platforms with dedicated share functions. However, the definition of shareable content goes beyond these examples and includes any online content that audiences feel compelled to show other people.
Trying to define exactly what makes a piece of content shareable is quite difficult. For example, the same piece of content presented to two different people could result in numerous shares from one, and no shares from the other, irrespective of their individual interests in the content. Fortunately, there are a few key elements that while not guaranteeing a share, will significantly improve the chances of your content being shared by its audience.
First and foremost, in order for your images to be as shareable as possible, they should also be as concise as possible. Infographics are probably the best example of highly shareable image content. There is a reason that these have become so popular on social media, and it is in large part due to the fact that they provide lots of information in a relatively small space. Most infographics are structured so that they provide either a single fact to the reader or numerous facts in rapid succession.
Use Images To Summarize Other Content
Infographics are one of the most important and popular formats of image-based content today, but they are not the only game in town. In fact, while it is good to use infographics, we would recommend that you also mix things up a little and don’t rely solely on infographics in order to generate backlinks.
A great way of generating backlinks to old content and giving it a second life is to create images that summarise the content in a concise and highly shareable format. It may be that the content in question is a relatively in-depth factual article, something that might seem impenetrable to a mainstream audience. By creating an accompanying graphic that lays out the key facts from the piece in an easy-to-understand manner, you can make an otherwise daunting piece of text seem much less intimidating to a reader.
Try to get into the habit of creating simple graphics that summarise all of your content going forward. Not only do these provide your audience with an easy means of sharing information with others, but it also enables people to share the content and purpose of your articles without requiring them to read through the entire thing. Because of this, your audience will be encouraged to share your content in situations where they otherwise would not.
Use Social Media To Amplify Your Content
If you are already putting together a selection of highly shareable and high-quality images with a view to generating more backlinks to your content, it would be absurd not to take advantage of social media. Like it or loathe it, social media platforms are where businesses today are made or broken. Long-term survival in the modern marketplace requires the savvy use of social media and an awareness of when and how to use it.
Social media platforms are by far the best place to share your images, especially if you want them to result in backlinks. Make sure that any images you post to social media that reference content on your website also contain a link to that content URL. Remember, when people share your images on social media, they won’t necessarily also share the company name and link back to the original content. Including this link yourself means that if your images end up in front of someone who wants to link back to you from their own website, they know exactly where to point their link.
If you deploy them the right way, images and graphical content are a very effective way of generating backlinks. Sometimes, it’s hard to convey to a reader why your wall of text is worth traversing in simple words. A graphic that summarizes your content might generate new interest and enable your audience to share it more easily. Stick to the tips above and you will be able to start generating new backlinks in no time.