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Using images in your blog posts is fun and when done well helps keep readers interested. Using images effectively in your blog posts can also help you get an extra little bit of SEO goodness. If you like using images, you need to know these techniques.
Get SEO right with new blog post images
The key to getting SEO images done right rests in how you view blog posts.
Many people view blog posts as an extension of paper. That is, blog posts are just like essays written on paper, except that they are display on a computer screen.
That’s only half the battle!
Think of it this way: writing a blog post that is both worth reading and appears in organic search requires a bigger picture. Images aren’t just for the human reader, who understands the context immediately. Images with SEO relevance help computer search algorithms determine quality of search results.
Here’s the key:
Adding effective, SEO-relevant image meta-information IS part of your creative process.
The right time to add SEO-friendly information to images is when you first upload the image for use in a blog post. This takes a tiny amount of time… something many “creatives” may resent feeling that optimizing images ruins writing flow. But it need not; when you see adding appropriate SEO information to your images as part of the creative process, it’s no longer a chore!
SEO relevant images, step by step
Example of creating an SEO image for WordPress
Adding SEO relevance is easy using the fields provided by the media manager in WordPress. First, choose a file to upload, then fill in the following fields:
- Title: WordPress will default the title to the file name. You want to do better than that.
- Caption: This is the text that becomes the “alt” attribute in the img tag. The caption is displayed below image, allows highly targeted keyword reinforcement.
- Description: Doesn’t appear in the default image placement for WordPress posts. You could modify WordPress pretty easily to display this text, for example, to help with search engine listings. Consider keeping the first 160 characters as a standalone description for maximum effectiveness. Many applications cut off text at 160 characters.
WARNING: No keyword stuffing!
If you don’t know what “keyword stuffing” is, don’t worry about it. If you do, here’s the current scoop: 1. keyword stuff may help in the short term, 2. Google and other search engines are aware of the technique, 3. when search engines fix their algorithms to punish keyword stuffing, you have a lot of work ahead of you unstuffing keywords. Very large companies may have software to automate stuffing and unstuffing. If you are reading this article, it’s a safe assumption you don’t.
Easily and quickly SEO-optimize existing blog post images
If you are just starting out, you should consider going through your currently small image collection and updating all the metadata. It may not seem worth it to you to dig back through all of your posts and clean up a few images when you’re not getting a lot of traffic, but that’s exactly the best time to do it!. You will definitely get a lot of practice, and while hating the tedium, you won’t ever forget to “do it right” the next time you embed an image in a blog post or page.
Here’s the process for converting existing images in your WordPress media library:
- First, install the Broken Link Checker Plugin. You will need this as you start changing image names.
- Next, find one of your “hot” images, and open it in the WordPress image gallery.
- Fill out all the descriptive information like caption and alt tags.
- Change the name of the image to something appropriate.
- Run Broken Link Checker to find and fix blog posts using that image.
- Repeat for as many images as you desire to optimize for SEO.
If you’ve read this far and want some help, email me with a link to your blog. I’ll take a look and let you know what I think. And here’s a Hot Tip for reading this far: check your images using Juicy Studio’s Image Analyzer.
