do pictures on the page improve rank?

I have website with about ~80 pages not sure if me going through all pages and adding random pictures could improve rank.....?

part of me say that it should as it could improve look of the site...... other part of me says that it would not matter much...

Have you ever tested if adding/removing pictures changed your rank?

anybody?

i am not aware of ranking to be upped/lowered because of images..

try focusing on link building to get your rank up!

It's hard to say for sure exactly what will or won't improve your rankings. But conventional wisdom would suggest that images are a (minor) element of on-page SEO.

SEOMoz has done some research on rankings, and one of the on-page elements that they include is whether or not you have an image with an alt tag that utilizes the targeted keyword. This tends to correlate with a slightly higher SERP.

I tend to always include an image, partially because of this, partially because it's a good user experience, and partially because it makes the article more share-able on a site like Pinterest. Don't know if it's worth going back to edit 80 pages after the fact, but I'd think it's a no-brainer to put an image in every page moving forward.

Oh, and just as a random aside, whether or not you have an alt tag Google can use it's search index to guesstimate what an image is about. Try using the "Search by Image" feature on Google image, it's pretty cool. So (to some extent) Google can determine if an image is relevant, and it's certainly a plausible element of their complex algorithm.