Placement is key

If an image is integral to the story, place it in the middle of the text. If it’s more supplementary, the image should be on the side. The same is true with all digital media, including everything from video, maps, and embedded tweets.

Use Visual Landmarks

When you're writing for the Internet, it's good to keep in mind that you're writing for an audience that has a significantly shorter attention span than the audience of a book, magazine, or newspaper. There's a whole lot of shiny stuff on the web that your readers can devote their attention to. So you have to kind of trick them into staying with you when you're writing longer pieces.

 

Visual landmarks, like headers, pictures, videos, and other embedded media, help keep your reader engaged. Elements like that break up the text so your reader doesn't look at the screen and see a wall of words).

Landmarks also help draw the eye down the page. Just as your reader is getting a little bit tired of reading, you give them a header or a shiny piece of media to look at for a few seconds. Not only does this help refresh the brain so your reader will stick with your article longer, it also satisfies the ADD that we all kind of have. If the brain is looking for something other than words to take in, the pictures and media in your article can be that distraction, without causing the reader to click elsewhere.  Excerpted from