Making stock images unique is a really good idea for search engine optimization. Believe it or not, search engine spiders can tell the difference between images based on the pixels in the image. The Google spiders use an algorithm to figure out what the images about and categorize it.
Every single image on the web is indexed in search engines according to the pixel density and colors inside that picture. Basically the picture is broken down into the numbers, ones and twos so that it can have a unique fingerprint. When you take a picture with your camera and upload it to the web, the search engines can tell that the photo is unique and it’s never been on the web before.
So what happens when you use stock images? It’s a lot like what happens when you copy other website content and paste it on your website. It’s considered duplicate content by search engines like Google and Bing.
So how do we make stock images unique? What we do on our website and on our clients websites is tweak the settings of a photo, such as a saturation and brightness and other settings to make them unique. This is a rather easy process and only takes a couple adjustments to make a unique image has never been on the web before.
Plus you can do some pretty cool artistic things as well! Here are some before and after photos that we’ve made unique for the web:
So the next time you’re looking to do a blog post or building a website and picking out stock images, think about how you can make those images unique by tweaking them or just get all new fresh the pictures for the web which would be better anyways. Check out this article Finding Free Images to grab the pics you need for the next web project.