Something that we have not talked about in this WordPress 3.9 Media Library series is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aspects of images. I think this is absolutely critical to using images in your website.
In past discussions about SEO and images, I’ve always included the title as part of it but for some reason or another the title is not showing up when we insert the image. Let’s pick a different page, say our News page. Let’s edit this image and link it to a custom URL. Update that and view the page. And it’s still not displaying the title which really surprises me.
I’m going to change themes. Let’s just use Twenty Thirteen and take a look. For whatever reason WordPress is not including the title in the tag of this so why it’s offering you the opportunity to place the title in there I have no idea. It used to place the title in but it’s not anymore.
Well, images can be used for SEO and I was going to say title is part of that but it’s no longer part of it because WordPress is no longer displaying the title when it places the image in.
How to Improve the SEO Ability of Images
There are two things that you can do to improve the SEO of your images. The first one is actually in the file name.
The File Name
Let’s delete this image and add media and take a look at it here. The file name, Forbidden-2004-002, is not an SEO-friendly file name. Rather than having names like this when you create your image you would better off giving it a name that has keywords in it.
The keywords should reflective both of the content of the image and also of the content of the page you’re inserting it into. So before you upload the image, you want to give it an SEO-friendly name.
Things to consider for an SEO-friendly name.
- All the letters are lowercase
- There are no special characters
- There are no spaces
- Reflects content of the image and page
So to recreate the name of this image using these rules we might name this image mt-forbidden-in-the-distance. At the very least this is descriptive of the content of the image and that helps in SEO.
Importance of Alt Text
The second thing that helps in SEO is the Alt Text. The Alt Text is specifically designed for screen readers and for people with visual disabilities and is intended to describe what the image is about. So a screen reader will come along and it’ll say image, “Mt Forbidden in the North Cascades”. The intention for your Alt Text is that it is descriptive of the image.
You can play with that a little bit by making sure that it’s relevant to the content of the page and therefore you can put some keywords in about that as well. Google will use that Alt Text to help it understand what your page is about. Now this is in no way useful if all you do is stuff the Alt Text with keywords.
For example, “Best TVs in Desert Hot Springs California”. If you put something like that in your Alt tags, Google is going to ignore it but as long as it is relevant to the content on the page and reasonably reflective of the content of the image then I think it’s useful for you to make the effort to do.
One of the things SEO checkers do is check all your images for Alt Text to see if you’ve got Alt Text with the images.
Display of Images in the Media Library
You do not need to add title, caption and alt. I added those in there specifically so that we could see where they are. Let’s go to the media library and take a look at the image we have. The title shows up here next to the image rather than the file name. It would show the file name if I hadn’t put title in there but since I did put a title in it’s not showing the file name.
Then we have to turn on screen options to see the description. No. Well, isn’t that funny? It’s not giving us the ability to see the description. Well that’s weird. Let’s edit the image and see. Oh, the description didn’t even go through. Let’s add one and see what happens.
It’s still not showing us the description. That’s a new feature in the media library that I didn’t see coming because you could always the description here before.
I wonder if search media searches the description. It looks like it probably does. Let’s get rid of the caption for a second and update that. I’ll come back to the library and see if I can search for North. Yes, it still searches the description even though it doesn’t display the description in the admin any longer.
It used to be the description was displayed here so that you could indicate what you were using the thing for. You may need to look for a plugin that adds the ability to show the description because that was the benefit of having one.
So prior to 3.9, what you saw here was the image name not the title and the title showed up as the title tag in the image insertion. Now with 3.9, the title attribute is no longer inserted into the image tag and the title is being used for the title of the media so that’s a change.
Anyway, to optimize your images for SEO in WordPress, you want to give your alternative text good descriptive text with somewhat keyword-rich words here and those will show up as the alt attribute inside of the image.