WordPress is a great blogging and content management software. What makes it even better is the huge number of plugins available for this software. Those plugins allow a lot of customization to a WordPress powered website. A web admin can easily make the site behave like the way he or she wanted to with the help of plugins.
While WordPress is great in managing the on-site SEO naturally, there are a few plugins and hacks that could help a site excel in SEO even more. One of the issues of SEO is to make the images on a website SEO friendly as far as possible. Making an image SEO friendly means adding the title tags and alt tags to the images. That way it increases the accessibility of the images on a website, making it more user-friendly. This is a plus point in SEO and site design.
So, to add the image tags like TITLE and ALT tags, WordPress has those friendly input boxes. It allows us to easily tag images with those helpful tags. But as a site webmaster, I have to say that it is not always possible to add title and alt tags to all the images. Sometimes we forget and sometimes we just like to skip. There is nothing wrong with it but it would be nice if all the images had an alt tag or a title tag.
But, like I said before, this is WordPress and there are thousands of plugins out there which helps us customize it the way we want to. There are many SEO plugins out there as well. One of those SEO plugins come greatly in use in a situation like this one. The plugin is called “SEO Friendly Images“, it’s free and made for WordPress image level SEO.
Here are some details on adding and using this amazing plugin:
- To add this plugin, just to go Plugins > Add New and then search for SEO Friendly Images.
- Hit “Install Now” and the plugin will be added to your WordPress website. After installation, activate the plugin.
- Then go to the Settings of the plugin that you just installed. You can reach the settings from your WordPress Settings > SEO Friendly Images
- These are the only settings that you need to and can configure:
- The ALT attribute and the TITLE attribute: the default settings are good enough and you can change it as per your choice.
- You can use the plugin tags: %title (for posts title), %name (file name of the image), %category (category of the post) and %tags (tags of the post).
- I just prefer to use %name for both ALT and TITLE attribute.
- When you use %name, you must be really careful with what file name you choose. Make sure that you don’t give your image file names like: image1.jpg or Untitled(1).jpg. Give them meaningful filenames like create-new-application.jpg. With this filename, your image ALT and TITLE tags would be “create new application”.
- You can also choose whether or not to override default WordPress image alt and title tags. I prefer not to override because for some images, I might want to give my own TITLE and ALT tags instead of the ones generated by this plugin.