Images in Wordpress

[bigeyecreative]

Wondering how best to utilize the tags for images in Wordpress.

I have these fields:

Title

Alternate Text

Caption

Description

Is it important that I fill all of these fields in?  And for these fields - is it best to use hyphens or underscores for SEO?

Thanks.

[ContactOnline]

Hi Justin,

Generally I fill out Title and Alternative text as the main fields the other two are used less often. Make sure that the content adequately describes the image and that the text surrounding it also is related. You'll also want to make sure your file name has the keywords too, but again is accurate to the image.

I would recommend using hyphens over underscores in pretty much anything to do with SEO especially with URLs.

one last thing try to focus on one keyword as stuffing in many can be counter productive.

hope that helps!

[bigeyecreative]

Thanks Alan.  Is it wise to add our main keyword along with the title of the image?

For example:

surfboard-jacksonville-florist.jpg

Surfboard is the image name - and jacksonville florist is our main keyword.

[ThompsonPaul]

Justin, all four of these fields are PLAIN TEXT fields - meaning you just type their content as regular sentences. Do not separate words with hyphens or dashes - just use regular spaces. The one place you would use hyphens (not underscores) is in the image file name itself.

alt text

• a simple description of the image. You can use a keyword here, but only if it actually describes the image.
• has a small amount of SEO benefit, especially if you're trying to get your image to rank in Image Search
• do NOT add the site's main keyword to every image's alt text. That would imply you're trying to get all pages/images of the site to rank for the same main term, which is pointless.

Title

• again, an ordinary description of the image. The text entered here will show up as a tooltip when hovering over the image on the page. It's often the same as the alt text, or can also be used to give instructions or even a photo credit. Note that, in absence of an image title, some browsers will use the alt text for the tooltip, but not all.
• has no beneficial impact on SEO. Search engines do not use it as ranking factor.

Caption

• a WordPress-specific field. Your theme/templates can be formatted so that photo caption information entered here will be displayed as a caption beneath the photo.
• photo captions are useful for SEO as search engines consider that on-page text in close proximity to the image is likely related to the image.

Description

• another WordPress-specific field. This can be implemented in themes/templates to display in situation where an image description is beneficial - such as in you website's internal search results. It can also be used in the admin backend to identify images.
• typically no SEO benefit unless it is somehow implemented in public templates.

Paul

[ContactOnline]

Hi Justin,

Generally I use the rule if the keyword helps to describe the image then yes.

You can get away with putting in a keyword if it's not, but that might skew results in your web stats if people are finding that page wrongly.

Basically the bounce rate is taken into consideration, this is where someone goes to a page then leaves it very quickly, so they bounce off the page.

That counts against you, so you want to make sure that if they find that page with the image on it that it has relevant content to what they were searching for, so in your example Jacksonville-florist might be what they were looking for, but they see a surfboard and think oh that's not what I was looking for and bounce to find something more relevant to the search.

So be careful how you name files, sometimes it's best not to stuff a keyword in where it's not wanted or needed.

Also Paul is right hyphens should only really be used in the file name, but you will also want to use them in a URL.

Google treats Hyphens as spaces, but it also helps with browsers that there isn't a space in the url as they then replace a space with a horrible looking %20 which makes the URL harder to read as a human.

Hope that helps.

[ThompsonPaul]

Hey Justin - it's been a while since you posted your question. Did you get the answers you needed or can you give us further clarification of what you're still needing help with?

If you did get the answers you needed, could you mark as  "Good Answers" whichever answers you found most helpful and mark the overall question as answered? This will help other users who may come across the question in the future.

Thanks!

Paul