If you own a real estate website (or intend to), or have a need to produce real estate related marketing materials, it's a great idea to invest in some real estate stock photos to spruce up your pages. For those of you who have spent time on the phone with me, you know that I'm a content freak. The written word is definitely king when it comes to search engine optimization, but you also can get some additional marketing mileage when you use images.

First, even for avid readers and text-fanatics like me, images break up the page and make the text more readable. We all need to take a visual break sometimes, like coming up for air during a long swim. A well-placed photo or graphic can do that and refresh the reader enough to keep moving on.

Second, you have some good SEO opportunities you can use to add value to your content if you spruce it up with some real estate stock photography. You can give your text some additional keyword density by carefully selecting the filename as well as the title, and alt attributes of your image and anchor tag. For instance, if you are writing about Long Island Real Estate, you can do this:

1. Name your stock photo something like "long-island-real-estate.jpg" and make sure you add title="Long Island Real Estate" and alt="Long Island Real Estate" to your img tag.
2. Next, if you are using the image as a link, use title="Long Island Real Estate" in your anchor tag.

Third, your readers will stick around longer and you'll convert more of them to leads if you use graphics and stock photos to ease the eye. I'm not a fan of sites that are all graphics for SEO reasons, but there is a balance required to make the site be appealing to visitors.

Fourth, using high quality real estate stock photography simply makes you look more professional. That will get you a lot of mileage and may make the difference between a phone call from that buyer who's on the edge...or not.

What I do is sign up for a month at a time and download as many as possible during that time until I need more photos for my collection. Try it out: