You’ve built a great looking website for your business. The site has a beautiful color scheme, simple layout for your users, and lastly, includes great images. But what if I told you that Google and other search engines cannot see those images the way users can? In fact, search engines have a very difficult time determining what an image is. Further, if a search engine cannot read your images, you’re actually missing out on valuable SEO points for your website.
Luckily, there is a simple fix to this problem that any website owner can do. It will help your site and it will also help your Google rankings.
Below, I will walk you through how to optimize your images using WordPress. If you’re site is not built with WordPress, the concept of image optimization is the same for all websites, so please continue reading.
What is Alternative Text?
Alternative Text is the textual information a website owner provides to describe an image on their site. It’s attached to every image on a site and it’s what search engines read in order to determine what an image is.
To better help you understand, I am going to walk you through how you can add alternative text to images on your WordPress website.
Step 1
First, log in to your WordPress website. You will land on your site’s Dashboard when you log in. From here, click on “Media” in the left side menu area.
Step 2
Once inside the media menu, I will select an image to update the alternative text for. For this article, I will select the image of the tigers.
Step 3
Once you select your image, your screen will now look like this. Scroll down to find where you can input alternative text for the image.
Step 4
When you scroll down, you will a space for you easily add alternative text.
Step 5
In this alternative text box, you will add a short description that describes the image. In this example, I have added “Two Tiger Cubs Playing in the Water.” A short, simple description that adequately describes the image. It is best to keep your descriptions under 10 words. You should also try to include the keywords you’re targeting for your article/site as well.
Step 6
The last step is to hit the Update button in the top right. You have successfully added alternative text to an image!
Now rinse and repeat this process for all the images on your website. This will help the overall user experience of your site and will keep Google smiling. You may even find that images on your site start showing up in Google Image searches as well. How about that?!