Usage of image to your website is not compulsory. But at the same time you should know that image conveys a lot of meaning to your articles and themes.

Usage of image will definitely increase the look and feel of your site. It also enhance the visitors experience. But these are not compulsory aspects compared to content.

It is sure that images will not get more importance than content other than the photogallery sites. But the usage of image will certainly help for the free traffic. Yes, when you add the image in the site with proper alt text (Alt text is the name you give to the image. You should provide a meaningful and relevant alt text for the image so that the search engine will read the image alt text and classify accordingly)

You should be aware the free traffic from google, yahoo, aol and msn not only comes from the search results, it also displays your site in the images search. Lots of searches are made in the image section of the search engine.

Given the correct alt tags and keyword you image will appear in the search result and your site will be found from the image. This is a mojor benefit as far as the search engines are concerned.

You should also aware the image will be protected by copyrights. So you should not use images just copying from some sites. If you copy a image with copyright free image that’s fine. But the quality of the image might not be good.

There are many stock photo sites which provides high quality images. Normally priced for a $ 1. But I can suggest you a best resource for less cost. It is shutterstock.com. You can download 25 images per day for 30 days for a cost of $ 200, which works to mere 27 cents per photo. This is  really a good deal.

So put the relevant photos to your site and make it look great.