Promotion of tourism websites by optimal use of images and video

National Geographic magazine’s ‘top covers of the last fifty years’ makes an interesting point. The majority of their most popular covers of the last half-century feature people somewhere in the photo. Some are of animals doing cute or interesting things. And a few are of natural disasters or events such as a volcano erupting. What are they not? Landscape photos.

Destination shots are wonderful, but commercial success in publishing is largely built on human interest, not on concrete and masonry (architectural journalism aside). Photos with faces are particularly advantageous due to their memorability. Recently, MIT researchers found after conducting a study on the memorablility of different groups of images that photos of people stayed much longer in memory than any other kinds of photos. Places where people were likely to be seen, such as an empty library or supermarket aisle, were remembered adequately. The losers of the memorability test were landscapes.

Though landscapes may be beautiful they are the least remembered form of photography, so it is important to incorpaorate human figures or, if possible, human faces. Warm colors were slightly better remembered than cool colors. Look at the banner advertisment above and ask yourself which unit catches your attention first. Similarly in the photograph below - the human figure gives the picture movement and focus

It’s important to remember that the "alt tag" text should be present for every photo and keywords should be included in that text. Choose two or three keywords but keep the context natural. Google now has very sophisticated methods to detect keyword stuffing of content, especially in alt tags, and will penalise a page or even a whole site if this is detected. If you add a caption with a link in it, the link anchor text must be relevant to both the content of the page hosting the image as well as to the landing page. This applies equally to the alt tag if the image itself is linked to another page. The writer or content manager needs to be aware of homonyms, which share the same spelling but have vastly different meanings,e.g. if the word ‘bank’ appears in the article after the word ‘river’, clicking on it shouldn’t take the visitor to a page about savings accounts. Descriptive captions help to organise your photos, and to keep your visitors clicking from page to page as they explore a certain destination or theme. Make good use of synonyms and veriant spellings - Google loves them.

Social media sites are abuzz with photography. Sites like Flickr and Pinterest make sharing easy, but Twitter also has file-sharing capabilities through Twitpic. On Pinterest, members keep photo boards and travel junkies can collect favorite destination shots.

On Twitter, there are also growing numbers of hash-tag chats involving photography and travel photography in particular. The best or most interesting photos are retweeted then by participants, and if your photos are among those retweeted then the exposure gained on one if these discussions is worth the time invested in planning and sending.

Using photographs to your advantage may mean online success for you and your company, so start building up your gallery.