A while back there was a post on the PAP blog that talked about using images in your poker articles and content pages, and I wanted to revisit this. I see a lot of poker sites (including some of my own) that have good content and solid SEO, but as far as design and visual appeal goes, they’re below par. When you think about it, images help your site in numerous ways:

1. You get to use Alt tags for the images with your keywords, which will help your SEO efforts.

2. Images help to break up long, text-only pages to increase readability.

3. When a visitor arrives at your page, they’ll be more likely to stick around if it’s visually enticing as opposed to a full page of text.

Although I read that article, and saw the benefits of using images on my sites, I couldn’t really do much about it at the time because I’m useless with Photoshop, and didn’t want to steal images from other websites. However, my buddy Jason Janes just launched a new site that helps poker webmasters solve their issue with image creation.

His new site is Pro Poker Pics (www.propokerpics.com) and provides affiliates with poker cartoons, poker rooms screenshots, and poker player images. Right now he’s in beta testing, but he already has over 300 images on the site, including 22 creative poker “cartoons” that look really cool in my opinion. Also, for those affiliates who like to use poker site screenshots in their reviews, you can find the screenshots right on his site, as opposed to downloading every poker room in the world.

I signed up for the site and swapped Jason a link for full membership, and I’ve been really happy with it. If you decide to sign up, here’s a few tips for how to use his images:

Use Pictures on Hub Pages as Well as Articles

A lot of affiliates will have images on either their strategy articles or their homepage/other hub pages, but not both. If you’ve got the images, I’d put them on every page as it helps the overall visual look of your site.

On strategy pages I like to place them a quarter of the way down the page, and either float them left or right with text wrapping around them. On hub pages I usually have them right at the top, smaller, and floated right.

Make Sure to Use Your Alt Tags

This is an easy way to boost your SERP’s for the pages you have images on. For those of you who haven’t used Alt tags before, here’s an example of how to do it. Note that the bold text is the Alt part.

<img alt=“Avoiding Tilt Image” src=“/images/your-image.jpg” height=“225″ width=“225″ />

Also, when you save the images change their names from images35234526.jpg to page-keywords.jpg to further aid your SEO efforts.

Pad Your Images

Although images usually help the visual appeal of a page, they can actually hurt you if they’re jammed into a page with text all around it. I love wrapping images within text, but when you do it make sure to pad your images at least 5 pixels on each side so the text is spaced out and still easy to read. This is actually controlled through your css file, and to add padding you’d add the following code:

img {
padding:5px;
}

If you follow all the above rules, and sign up for Jason’s poker pictures site, you get a page that looks like this: Avoiding Poker Tilt

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 12:28 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.