As a platform, WordPress has some significant advantages over other content management systems. Most website hosting companies support WordPress, and for those who host their own websites, WordPress is easy to install and customize. Search engine optimization (SEO) is always a consideration, and WordPress SEO options are designed to help you drive traffic to your website. One simple tactic – modifying your image alt tags – can give a noticeable boost your WordPress SEO strategy.
WordPress SEO and Images
Today’s search engines are pretty adept at deconstructing the text on a web page to figure out how it relates to a user’s search term(s). Relevance is king, so the words on a page are critically important to a search engine. But most web pages don’t consist of words alone. Pictures, animations, graphics, videos and other materials enrich the content and make web pages more attractive to human readers.
Unfortunately, the search engines are blind to this enriched content (which might be just what the searcher is looking for) unless it is properly tagged and described. So how can you help a search engine understand and rank your non-textual content?
Use Alt tags as a WordPress SEO strategy. WordPress allows you to add alt tags to images and other content. This helps the search engine figure out what a human reader is looking at, and whether or not the content is relevant to the search. An alt tag is simple, and most often, you’ll want to use one or more keywords, separated by a comma, as part of an alt tag. Here’s an example of a SEO-friendly alt-tag.
img src=”http://www.sample.com/gallery” alt=”website design, business marketing, search engine optimization”
You can see that once the image source has been identified, the alt tag can be loaded with relevant keywords.
If you don’t use alt tags with images, the search engine won’t guess whether the image is relevant to the search. Depending upon how you upload images to your site and how your upload tool is configured, your images might get tagged with their file names by default – or worse – a number. If you weren’t crafty with your image file names, you may have lost the opportunity to use your images as part of your WordPress SEO strategy.
If you would like more information about WordPress SEO, website design or ways to boost traffic to your website, please contact our Creative Director, Dave Ramsell or give Dave a call at (330) 243-0651 to set up a consultation.
Photo Credit: svilen001, via FreeImages.com
