Using WordPress to optimize your Images for Search
The Google image search is a very good way to increase your organic traffic. To properly optimize your site and your images you can do a few things, but really these are things you should be doing anyways. These things are:
- src - the location of the picture. You have to put this anyways.
- title and alt - they can be the same. Make it as descriptive and to the point as possible.
- height and width - in pixels, to tell Google the exact size.
The src is obviously important so that the image will actually appear, but the alt attribute is what you really need. Not only will your XHTML doctype not validate, but this is the one factor that contributes most to helping you out.
Using WordPress to Make it Quick
WordPress’ built in WYSIWYG editor has an image button that will do all this for you.
After that, you should fill in the following dialog, almost completely. You can leave some fields empty, but the ones you need are filled in
So as you can see, filling in some simple info can lead to much more organic traffic. All it takes is a couple of seconds and you can see a huge increase in page views. WordPress can also assist in this process with some of its other functions, like uploading, auto sizing, etc… I saves you a lot of time when you don’t have to open up FTP or go to a different image hosting site.
Leave a comment
David Airey :: Creative Design ::
April 26th, 2007 at 4:13 AM
So you know, your RSS feed link is broken.
You’ve spelt feedburner without the ‘d’ so it reads feeburner.
Connor Wilson
April 26th, 2007 at 6:36 AM
Wow, thanks for pointing that out, I never realized that.
Fixed! Thanks again.
webee
April 26th, 2007 at 12:40 PM
have you got any results so far?
how can you measure the increase of traffic due to this factor?
i will start to implement it also from this moment… but i’m not sure how we can evaluate the results…
webee
[is a design blog]
Andrew Rouhafzai
April 26th, 2007 at 2:10 PM
This guide is true, I put up a pic of Ivanka Trump on my blog and ranked 2 for her in image search after 3 days, lol.
Connor Wilson
April 26th, 2007 at 3:31 PM
I’ll measure stats with Mint, but I haven’t really put this into place yet.
Adnan
April 26th, 2007 at 5:32 PM
Good tips Connor. I dont even have that Picture Wordpress box thingy cos I use HTML editor instead of WYSIWYG! Dam! I’ve been spending ages adding it manually.
Connor Wilson
April 26th, 2007 at 5:41 PM
A lot of people don’t use the WYSIWYG in WP for some reason, but I like it. Adding headings would be an awesome feature though…
Alex Mould
April 27th, 2007 at 5:33 PM
Quite useful. Thanks
Connor Wilson
April 27th, 2007 at 5:35 PM
Thanks. I should start using this myself. :\
Steve Wordpressguy
May 3rd, 2007 at 8:45 AM
Nice short tutorial. One blog I worked on got huge results from rigorous image optimization like this, though I’ve never been disciplined enough on my own blog. It will be interesting to hear how your stats go.
Dermaroller
October 28th, 2008 at 6:12 AM
So what would someone have to type into images to get this result. I presume from your WYSIWYG tutorial that the phrase “WordPress Image Insert” would be the search term that would produce your image as a result.
Apologies if this is a really stupid question!
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