We know that Google ranks images. We also know that Google likes stock images (images that it knows) better than unique images, but we have never tested to see if there is an image density in place much like keyword density. Say, you have an article of 1000 words, how many images should you put in it? Theory would be at least one, but is that enough? Is there a threshold? If so, what is it? We check those out in this test.
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So here's a test by Hunter. Number 337. Is there a preferred number of images? The hypothesis is? Google includes an image density/ratio and ranking content. Now this is something I can't imagine we haven't done before, but we hadn't done this before.
We know Google ranks images, of course, and we know Google likes stock images images that it knows better than unique images. But we never tested to see if there was an image density in place. You know much like keyword density, so this is something that I wanted to begin testing. We started off. We actually didn't put a thousand words but instead 990. I’ll tell you why later...
You have an article of a thousand words. How many images should you put in it? You know the theory would be at least one, of course, but is that enough? Is there threshold? If so, what is it? You know this is the stuff that I wanted to know. Just like the number of words or the number of keywords, I feel like this is pretty important. After this one, we're gonna do a number of videos or all kinds of different Media types,.
Here are the pages that we did. We used 990 words instead of one thousand because it didn't look as obvious as being an article ordered somewhere. Ten pages with close to a thousand words, so it's really easy to calculate image density. So this is what the pages look like: He put them in and used all the same images, and that could be something that we need to also test as well; different images. But this test is a beginning test into this concept.
The images are all the same and the paragraphs are basically the same like in the same spacing and then the rest of the text was hanging down here. Now, that's something else that could be tested. It could divide it up totally equal. Like, if there's three images on the page, it has to have equal text between.
In any case, here are the sites, and here is how they are numbered. The page with 4 images climbed to the top right out of the gates, and then it shuffled a lot. The page with two images was there a lot and we thought we had a clear winner and then, when we were gonna call it, the page that had four images moved up and settled into that spot.
When we were writing up to test, this was the last image that we pulled and it was going to be like this looks pretty good. It's four. But that's not the case. We kept on looking at it and it's still shuffling around, but at the time it appeared that it was four and it was also coinciding with what was on Google Mobile too. So the desktop and mobile were look exactly the same, and that was really cool, but I got ta say... it's inconclusive.
Well, unfortunately, it's still bouncing around this. This column right here was when they called the test and when the tests were written up. Then these were where they were checked afterwards, so you were, we can say in the analysis, you know maybe two, four, six images every for every 1,000 words.
Certainly not 7 or one because they were really down here, but I think this needs to settle a little bit more and we'll continue to update the leaderboard with this and do some other testing around images, because it's really something that I want to nail down as a best use like a sweet spot for keywords. I'd like to have a sweet spot for images and videos, and things like that, so we'll be continuing on on this one.