This morning I received an email from Alexander, one of my email subscribers, asking me for more information about how to optimize images for SEO on a WordPress blog.
How To Optimize Images For SEO
This post is my answer to Alexanders question. I thought it was a nice idea to create a quick video and blog post about how I optimize images on my blogs and post it here so more than one person can benefit from Alexanders question.
How To Optimize Images For SEO
The first thing I do to optimize an image on my blog is make sure that the file name that I upload to WordPress is named as the keyword that I am trying to rank my post for. I will use this post as an example. I took a screenshot of the email that I received from Alexander to embed in this post for an example.
I’ve decided to target “optimize images for seo” as the keyword for this post, so after taking the screenshot from my inbox I renamed the file to optimize_images_for_seo.png before uploading it to WordPress.
SEO For Images
Optimize Images For SEO Using Alt Tags
The next thing I do to improve the SEO of images on my websites is to use the Alt Tag and enter the keyword again as the alt tag. This is the text that will appear in place of the image if for some reason your visitors browser cannot load the image. In that case it will display whatever text you set as the Alt Tag.
How To Optimize Images For SEO
If you add multiple images to your posts like you should, then each image should be targeting a different related keyword or a secondary keyword that you would like to rank the page for. As you can see in this post, I’ve added multiple images and each one is targeting a different, yet similar, keyword relating to how to optimize images for SEO on a WordPress blog.
Include Your Image SEO Keywords In The Description
When you upload an image to WordPress, make sure you fill in the description! So many people leave it blank for whatever reason and could be losing out on a tiny but valuable SEO boost from the images in their posts. Be sure to include the keyword in the images description field, this helps google spiders know more about what the image is about.
Make Your Images Clickable
Another thing that I like to do is make most of my images clickable. To do this, just link your image either to itself (the URL of the image after it’s been uploaded to your site) or to the URL of the post that it is embedded in.
I haven’t experimented too much with which is better, linking to the image URL or the post URL, but either one seems to work fine for me, just make sure the image is clickable. It seems like Google uses the Alt Tag as a type of anchor text for the clickable image, which is why this is an important part of your image optimization efforts.
That about wraps it up! I hope this answered Alexanders question and helped you learn how to optimize images for SEO on your WordPress websites. If you have any questions about things like this, feel free to contact me and ask – I love answering questions here on my blog for everyone to learn from.
Thank you! In this post, thorough and detailed how to insert pictures in the blog posts. A more detailed report, I have not seen. Thanks again for the work done. Sincerely, Alexander.
Aleksandr’s blog: Tips To Boost Women’s Health
You’re welcome Alexander! I hope it will help you get your blogs more optimized and gain you some more traffic from the search engines!
Totally agree with that strategy. I also always make images clickable.
If the post is about “stress” for example on one of my health sites I will add the “link URL” for the product review on the same site.
To avoid outbound links to merchants’ sites I always have ONE page or post related to their product with an affiliate link included and from then on every post related to that topic has a link to the original page/post. That way I boost my internal links and onpage SEO.
Do you agree with that strategy.
JR’s blog: Website Content Writing Needs Creative Planning For Top Revenue
Hey JR, That sounds like a solid strategy for boosting your SEO to the pages you’re passing the links to internally instead of always linking out to your merchants/affiliate sites. It’s something I like to do on my pages as well, and in the last year or so Google has been giving more value to internal linking and site structure than it has in the past, so this strategy should pay off in the long run as well.
By the way – Your comment was sent to my spam folder even though you didn’t leave a bunch of links in your comment. Perhaps Akismet has marked your site, email address, or IP address as spam! Just a heads up on that, I un-spammed your comment and approved it though.
Cheers, and thanks for leaving me a comment. I appreciate it, especially on a new blog such as this, it really helps get it going with a bit of natural link love and comment activity.
My comments did not import!
Oh well, I have switched to using Disqus comments on this site! At least I installed it early.
Okay, after doing some playing around, I moved comments back to CommentLuv format! DoFollow links if you +1, Tweet, or Facebook Like the post, and DoFollow links if you get 3 or more approved comments here!
Hi Mitch,
I have read through your post and found it quite interesting. But of course before I believe what I read I check other marketers blogs to see what they have to say about optimizing their images for SEO and some of them do not think that over optimizing your images for SEO is a good thing especially after the penguin update. Of course the alt tag should contain the keyword or at least a variation of it but using it in the tile, caption, description and alt tag seems to be too much of a good thing.
Have you experienced any issues on your site after the penguin update?
Cheers
Sebastian
Honestly, almost all of my sites got hit with Penguin, but I am pretty sure it has more to do with over optimization of anchor text and the number of links pointing to your website that never generate any clicks or traffic.