How to Optimize Images for Search on WordPress
Improving image SEO is very important. When your images are optimized properly, they can bring lots of new visitors to your site. But how do you optimize your images? This post discusses the crucial things you need to do to help search engines find your images and index them for the right keywords.
Optimizing for speed and SEO
Speed plays a crucial role in both user experience and SEO. Search engines rank fast websites higher than the slow ones. This is the same for the images. Images will increase the load time of your page. Having several images means your page will take longer to load up. You therefore need to optimize the images. To optimize images for search, you have to select the right file format and use small file sizes. WordPress has an image compression plugin that you can use to optimize your images automatically.
Use alt text
The alt text is an HTML attribute that is added to the image tag. It is something like this:
<img src=”/fruitbasket.jpeg” alt=”A fruit basket” />
Alt text allows you to describe your images in plain text. You can even use your keyword in the alt text to boost image SEO. Alt text helps the search engines to understand your images and rank them accordingly. You can add alt text when uploading an image on WordPress.
Alt text differs from caption in that it describes an image for the search engine and the screen readers. Captions, on the other hand, describe the image for all users. The alt text will not be visible on your website whereas the caption will be visible. Alt text is crucial for better image optimization.
Adding alt text
When adding an image using the default image block on WordPress, you will be able to add the alt text easily. The image block generates the title for your image from the file name. you can change this by clicking on the edit button in the image block’s toolbar. To the right of the screen you will find the editing options. Here is where you add a caption, alt text and make other changes to your image.
The key to optimizing images for search is writing descriptive alt text. This means using long tail keywords in place of one word keyword. You also need to use descriptive file names for the images, use original photos and follow the SEO best practices.