Images are killing your internet marketing. The Business Community understands having a website is just as necessary as having an Income Statement. And it should be. Your website and social media appearances are the best way to share who you are and everything you do to prospects, customers, and clients. As sustainable marketing tools, the most cost effective. But here’s the thing my friend. All that great information about your business are being overshadowed by the big “slider” or “carousel” of images on your home page. These slideshows and moving parts are preventing you from attracting new prospects and maintaining current ones.

Keyword Search not KeyImage Search

Carousels and Sliders result in lower SEO rankings. Keyword Searches require content. When your business opts for a dynamic slider of images rather than meaningful, purposeful content; your search rankings suffer tremendously. Web Designers and Coders need a unified tool for Search Engines to produce results. That tool is a heading code called the HTML h1 tag. SEO best practices require only 1 of those h1 tags per webpage. A slide with moderate content or none at all will have several h1 tags that continuously change. The headings are never precise enough for search engines to take notice.

More is Less

Having more images, using load-barring codes like Flash or Jquery to run the slide equals less time we are willing for it to load. Increased use of mobile devices and soon other non-standard screen sizes require more flexibility and responsiveness. With all the high-resolution photos the load time for these devices is a detriment.

They call it the Blindfold effect. Audiences visit your site are for accurate information. That information is often buried below a big show of images forcing the user to scroll down to find content. We use the web because it’s fast. Once we’ve found your site, making us do more work to find out more about you becomes annoying. Some visitors just move on and never explore further.

Visitors become even more confused when the headings in the Slides changes but the rest of the content doesn’t change. Remember he/she is searching for your h1 headings. Think of it as the Title. The best way to get people to read something that has a great title right? Well when the title doesn’t match the content of the book, the book doesn’t sell.

So what is the solution? It is quite simple. Get rid of the slideshow. If you use WordPress or similar CMS template, you should be able to shut it off with the click of a button.

Explore a content-first web design. Craft compelling and meaningful content that will hook them on to your site.

I’m not suggesting banning the images altogether. There is the Hero Image, combining a single image with solid, relevant content. The use of a Hero Image can also be attractive and visually pleasing.

Implementing these solutions can increase your SEO and Usability. Resulting in improved visitor relations, future marketing endeavors and, more importantly, sales.