Google is now rewarding you for having a mobile-friendly website and that includes having mobile-friendly blog posts. Beginning April 21, 2015, Google announced mobile-friendly pages would receive better rankings and helpful labels. Unfriendly pages will get ranked lower.
From a technical perspective, mobile-friendly blog posts means more than ensuring you have a responsive website.
Mobile devices changed how we design websites and they changed how we write short content for the web. Mobile-friendly means focusing on showing text content in its most readable form, especially when your content is primarily text.
Good blog posts are short and easy to skim for meaning independent of pictures or illustrations. Images are the icing on the cake, enriching your text with memorable visuals. But your text must function without them.
Write to be read on mobile devices. The images should be complimentary. The blog post should not depend on them. The text cannot require visuals to be understood. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have images! We love images that are relevant to the text!
How to Make Mobile-friendly Blog Post Images
With a few standard rules, you can simplify blog post image process and ensure they look great whatever device your customer uses.
First, find the width of your website. Ask your web designer how many pixels across your body content area is. This is the maximum, or full width for any picture.
Choose full-width every time you crop and resize an image. Pick a standard height as well, no wider than the image.
Insert one image at the top of each post.
Stick to one image. If your post is no more than 800 words, you don’t need any more. One good image suffices unless your post has step-by-step instructions that need illustration. Even those images should be full-width.
Finally, always choose “None” in the Image Alignment menu. Since your image is already full width, you don’t have to worry about centering or text wrapping.
Supporting mobile-friendly blog posts is going to only become more relevant to users. How are you implementing mobile-friendly blog posts into your website?