8 Things You Should Be Doing For Every Image On Your WordPress Site

Nowadays, placing an image on your site isn't just a simple case of uploading and publishing. To optimize your website for the best search results, there's a couple of things you should be doing before you actually make them live on the internet.

Editing Your Images

Firstly, don’t worry if you do not have access to Adobe PhotoShop as there are several free web-based image editing tools to help you.

These websites offer free tools that make it easy to crop, resize, and edit your images:

• PicMonkey - https://www.picmonkey.com
  
• Fotor - http://www.fotor.com
  
• Pixlr - https://pixlr.com

Optimise and Compress Your Images

Large image files take up a lot of valuable space on your website and will slow down your site speed and hinder its performance considerably. Before you upload any image to your site, compress it - or at as a minimum, make sure you have the Ewww Image Optimizer Plugin installed as advised by Kyle in the lessons.

In tools like Photoshop, all you need to do is click on “compress for web” before saving your image file. Most of the online tools detailed above provide a similar option in their saving mechanism. Site speed has an impact on ranking factor, so the quicker users' browsers can download your images, the better.

• TinyPNG - https://tinypng.com
• PNGGaunlet - http://pnggauntlet.com
• PunyPNG - http://www.punypng.com
  

Results vary, but in one test, Adobe Photoshop reduced a 236 KB image to 108.1KB, while TinyPNG reduced the same file from 236KB to 110.4KB. So Photoshop does compress files a little better, but the difference is negligible.

Consider Your File Names

Now that you have optimized your new image, you must now be sure to give it a good name. Most search engines use an image's file name to index for their results pages, so it needs to be taken seriously. Naming a file with just numbers and/or letters doesn’t give the search engines the information the need to know regarding what an image is about. So using a good specific file name for your images - for example “New York at Dawn” allows the search engines to both categorize and index it. However, naming your file just as “New York” really doesn’t 'sell' the image to the search engines at all. So we need to use our much-loved and well-researched keywords in our file names if we are to have the perform well in search engine results pages. Another good idea is to try and use hyphens to separate individual words.

Image URLs

Now you are ready to upload your newly optimised image. When you come to do this you'll notice that WordPress gives you all of the attachment information in a separate box. This includes the permalink URL, which is always based upon the file name you gave the image - this is the URL of your image. Once this has been uploaded, it is difficult to change this. Yes, there are some useful plugins that can help with image file renaming, but if you can avoid this action at source, you'll not need them. Alternatively, you'll have to delete the image and upload it again after you've renamed it.

Image Title Attributes

The image title box is right below the URL box. Here, you can name the image whatever you like. This title should complement the Alt Text Attribute, but not repeat it. Though, Google primarily uses the Alt Text Attribute to determine information about an image file, it’s helpful to add additional relevant information about the image in the Title box. Something short and specific will do.

Your Image Captions

Adding a caption is not necessary for SEO purposes, but may be helpful for user experience. The content in this box will display on the front end of the site while the Alt and Title Attributes will not.

The Alt Text Attribute

The “Alt” is short for alternative. Search engines refer to the alt text when trying to determine information about the image – a textual representation of the image content. The best use of an Alt Text box is to provide a word pairing for the image. Specificity helps here, too. This is a very important element for SEO because it provides a description that lends to search results. Don’t use the same content for the Alt Text and Title Text or Description fields. They each need to be unique. This is the content that will appear if a browser is unable to display the image.

Your Image Descriptions

The description information will be displayed on the attachment page of your image. In this field, you can be as descriptive as you like, such as telling the story behind the image or what kind of camera you used to take the photograph. You can add links in the description field. Again, don’t just copy and paste the information from the Title or Alt Attributes.

Hopefully this gives you an idea of best practice when adding images to your website. As always. please LIKE this blog if you found it of use. If you have any questions, do feel free to leave me a message in the comments below and I'll come straight back to you.