How the SERPs Guide Content — Whiteboard Friday

Next up, we have images, and here, a few different things are happening on the search results.

We might see some little tiles of images. They all can have a different size. There’s no clear structure or guideline. Sometimes it looks a bit inspirational, almost like Pinterest type content.

What it means for you, if you see something like this, is that the content you create for your topic should contain images, and of course, those images need to be relevant to the content you’re writing.

Now what I also see more and more coming up in the Google search results is like what we would say standard, old-school search results, with a title tag and a meta description. Then next to it, to the right side, we have a little thumbnail image. I see this very often when it’s about content for travel destinations, for example.

So imagine this here was an image of a beautiful beach with palm trees somewhere in the Caribbean. Now it is important when you create your content, that this image again needs to be relevant to the content that you’re writing, and you also want to give Google some hints that say, yes, this image is actually relevant. It fits this content. It’s not a random beach. It is that same beach that I’m talking about in my text. So, in this case, what we would do, is give it an alt text, the image file name, an image description, and mention the name of that particular beach. Don’t just say here’s a beach. Google can see that on its own. It doesn’t need your information for that. But give it a name.