I stumbled upon this old forum post, where commenters were saying that a lack of content will hurt your search engine visibility.
I haven’t launched my website yet, but many of my posts focus mainly on the feature image (an infographic), with very little text. I could collect the images into a single post, but separating them allows me to achieve my desired site structure.
I will occasionally post long, educational articles to my /blog/ section, but I’m worried that it won’t be enough for search engines.
Search engines largely don’t understand images. (This post is not going to age well, obviously. Perhaps it is already out of date.) The advice to include text has to do with making sure there’s something to index.
From an accessibility standpoint, you might also want to have a text version of your information, since a screen-reader won’t parse your image either.
So maybe you have a featured image, but then you also provide a description of it, or additional commentary, or links to source material, or…?
I have descriptions containing the critical information for each image. For example:
The [item] has a length of 3", a height of 6", and a weight of ½ oz. It’s great for [purpose] and pairs well with [item] and [item].
I feel confident that my audience would get value from the metrics and other info, despite how bland it sounds. I’m just worried that a search engine will look at the page and say, “Yeah there’s barely anything here/ I’m not indexing this.”
Do you think a page that’s essentially just image+sentence is index-worthy?
Google does appreciate more content, and my client who had only image descriptions didn’t end up ranking well. But his content wasn’t unique content. Try to be an authoritative information source on your topic.
When I ran websites on Wordpress, the SEO plugin normally screamed out loud when the content was less than 300 words. Stating that was too less information. I don’t know if that is true or not. However, I believe it is not too hard to swing together 300 words.
But once upon a time not too long ago I tried to create a ‘self hosted’ site based on the idea of short format posting. That did not fly well with any Google tools known to mankind…
