I guess everyone is familiar with the line, "A picture paints a thousand words." You can have a website filled with text and numbers, they might be very useful but your visitors can get bored on it within seconds if that’s all they could see. An image or a picture is a very powerful tool. In early civilization, kings and other nobles relied on paintings to show them what their intended looked like before signing a marriage contract, spouse unseen.

Over the years, this kind of system has been perfected with the use of advance technology. Nowadays, online marketers rely on digital image to showcase their product and the online shoppers rely on digital images to show them what an item looks like before committing to a purchase, merchandise unseen.

Several studies have shown that image posses a very powerful influence in the buying attitude. Thus, it establishes how important images are in web design. I have researched two major ways on how images can add value to your web design.

1. Images appeals to the soul
Images have a kind of unexplainable effect on the psychological side of each person. According to Dr. David Kirsh, Professor of Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California "illustrations are also used to help explain hard concepts ... they save memory because they allow the viewer to look at all the facets of the situation at once rather than sequentially as in a paragraph of prose, they save the cognitive effort of visualization, and they allow for more ready understanding of the text, particularly when the correspondence between textual element and visual element is easy to map."

Several researches emphasized that there is a need for an image to explain technical items, and it is easier to retain facts if it is accompanied with images.

On the book "The Psychology of Graphic Images: Seeing, Drawing Communicating" written by Manfredo Massironi, he states, "Because we can readily interpret them, drawings seem unproblematic. Because they show what we see, they appear faithful. Because they make us see what the person who drew them intended to show us, we consider them reliable."

To sum this up, image is an excellent way to promote your product. With the proper use of image, your website could look more credible and reliable.

2. It can help to your SEO campaign
Using images as part of SEO campaign is one of the most overlooked methods in SEO. With effective optimization image can drive considerable amount of traffic into your website. They can be used as bait because images provide site visitors instant visual stimulation.

When using images, add keywords to the title field and add a keyword then brief description to the image description field. After uploading the image, a new screen appears with these fields above the text/picture box.

Name your images properly. Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file. Use dashes (-) between the words of images, rather than underscores (_). That way search engines pick it up better and will not class it as one word.

Make use of the power of Alt attribute of the img tag. Search engine also gives importance to alt tag to determine the page rank of the website. In fact, Google indexes the text given in the ALT tags of images. The ALT attribute can also useful in conveying message to the user because it shows when the user pass over the image with his mouse.

Images can be very helpful when used properly. It does not only enhance the aesthetic outlook of your website but it can also help in increasing your ranking. Not to mention, image can help you convince the potential customer to hit the BUY button.

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