Do you have to?
No.
Do we recommend that?
Yes.
It's recommended to
upload a picture with your blog post for a few reasons:
- Improve your blog message.
- Make your blog more appealing
to readers.
- Improve our main blog
cards.
Here is a blog on Yoast.com talking about some best practices to post images on your blog posts.
Also you can see this example for one of our blogs on Naturist Blog.
We recommend to read this article here to show you the recommendations and steps on how to post an image to your blog or to your forum.
As far as the aspect ratio for the blog images, you can use the standard ratio which is 16:9, and to be as a minimum of 506 x 253 pixels or 1200 x 675 pixels.
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