How To Add Alt-Text To Images – A SEO Tip

Did you know that when it comes to posting images on your blog, for best SEO practices, it is wise to have an alt-text on the image? This helps a little SEO wise but it’s also great for user experience. Ever notice on this blog, if you hover your mouse over an image in the blog post, the name of the image appears? That’s the Alt-Text tag being filled out. I am not sure WordPress’s default protocol for this, but here at WPoutcast, we use a trusted plugin.

The plugin is called Restore Image Title and there are no settings for this plugin. Just install it and name your images before you upload them into a blog post.

• Also Read: Optimize Images for speed

Here is an example of the final version:

After you install the Restore Image Title plugin, for any existing images already on the blog, you will have to manually add the alt-text and reupload them for the feature to take effect. That’s the only downside to this plugin, and I recommend it mostly for people who have just started a blog.

From Start to Finish – Adding an Alt-Text

Let’s start with editing an existing image’s alt-text so you can then upload that image to the blog post it’s already in. This is the recommended way from the makers of the plugin, In a moment, I’ll show you the way I do this, which I feel is the easiest.

Navigate to the Media tab:

Click on edit as we want to edit the image to add tags first.

Where I circled, that’s where you can add a short descriptive name for your image. This will be shown when you hover over the image in a blog post, plus indexed in Google Images search eventually. Click the update to save changes. After you do this, you need to navigate to the blog post that this image is in and manually add the image back into the post. This means clicking on “add Media” in the blog post and uploading the image using the new code that’s generated, as the old URL format won’t show the Alt-Text over the image.

WPOutcast’s Easier Method

Here is the method I have been using for several years, and feel it’s much more efficient than the one listed above. When I know a blog post’s images do not have the Alt-Text on them, I edit the blog post and click on Add Media, then I navigate to the image in my media directory like so:

On the page above, you will see the title of the image and a place for the Alt-Text. Decide what is best for each of these fields depending on the image and the blog post. After you fill that in, insert the image into your blog post where ever you want it to be. If you are re-uploading an image with new Alt-text, replace the old code with the new one.

Here is an example of the code that this plugin does to show this special effect.

<img title="add The Text"  src="https://www.wpoutcast.com/wp-content/uploads/add-The-Text-900x337.png" alt="add The Text" width="900" height="337" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-29531" />

Hover your mouse over the last image I uploaded to see what the code above will do automatically. There are still images on this blog that I need to re-upload with the new code, so it’s an ongoing process. I just prefer editing images this way because I will re-do every image in the blog post and know I didn’t miss any. This process also allows you to visit your old images, and see if any of them need any updating or resizing, depending on your current theme.

Images Very Important Still

Having your images indexed in the Google Image search is another way of getting traffic. If you watermark your images and someone use’s it, your domain is listed on the image so you still have credit for the image and potential traffic to see what your blog is about. Images are very important in blog posts and in SEO.

Do you have any questions about this plugin or the method I showed?

Share this blog post if it’s been helpful.