If you’re actually serious about making the most out of your WordPress website then it’s vital that you do everything that’ll ascertain your site’s visibility over the World Wide Web. One such crucial factor that needs to be looked after is the optimization of your WordPress website for all the major search engines. Setting up your site to communicate to Google is considered a revolutionary step towards enhancing the site’s reputation among potential customers. Although each website element plays its individual role in enhancing the site’s overall performance, images are the basic traffic-generating tools. If you want greater traffic for your website, you must learn the techniques of optimizing the images as per the SEO standards. I’ve written this blog to help you know how you can optimize your WordPress site’s images to impress the search engines.
Why should you add images to your posts?
Someone has said rightly, “Pictures speak louder than words”. The same rule applies to websites as well. If you want web users to stay on your website for longer durations of time, it’s essential to add images to your posts. Long paragraphs of text can easily turn off your readers, making them leave your website. Breaking up the content by including relevant images can add a tint of professionalism into your site, making it more inviting and appealing. In addition to this, including images in your posts also acts beneficial for your site’s search engine optimization. Popular search engines like Google, MSN and Bing look for images in web pages while ranking websites on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Method No.1- Choose a descriptive name for your image file
Prior to uploading an image, select a descriptive file name; you want for the image when it’s been displayed on the search engine results pages. In other words, file name is the keyword that’ll appear along with your image when someone searches for files using the same keyword.
Method No.2- Include Alt Text into the images
As human beings, we can interpret the actual theme of an image by simply looking at it. This isn’t the case with search engine spiders. You need to make the spiders understand what each image placed on your site portrays. For this, you can simply include alt text to your image tag. Just add the below mentioned function to your image tag:
Alt=”this is your alt text”
Method No.3- Make the image file size as small as possible
In order to ensure faster load times, you must optimize the size of your image files. You may use tools such as Picnik and Image Optimizer to decrease the size of your image files, without compromising on the quality. Since web page load times matter a lot for SEO, optimizing the size of image files will actually work in your favor.
Method No.4- Include captions in images
Image captions are considered as the well-read pieces of content on the entire website. Hence, it’s crucial to include meaningful captions along with each image placed on your WordPress website. Search engines prefer ranking websites that include images with captions.
Method No.5- Automate the image optimization process by installing plugin
If you’re running multiple WordPress websites then it’ll definitely be time-consuming to optimize each individual image placed on your web pages. Downloading and installing WordPress’ SEO plugin can automate the image optimization process for all your websites. SEO Friendly Images is an amazing plugin which updates all the images with proper ALT text and Title attributes, making your website rank higher on all major search engines. Installing SEO Friendly Images will also ensure W3C validation of your website.
Conclusion
Inserting images into your posts can actually improvise your web content. Even a plain-looking article can get a trendy look and feel with the relevant photos or images. Just like adding images, ensuring the search engine optimized stature of these images is quite crucial for improving the search engine ranking of the website.
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