Image attributes in WordPress and SEO –

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Image attributes are one of the options that WordPress includes in its media options and that you should use if you want that image or published article to be positioned in Google.

These small details, such as assigning a title or filling in the alt attribute in each image that you upload to WordPress, help the SEO of your website.

I am not going to lie to you and tell you that if you fill in or replace all the image attributes on your website you will start to climb positions, but I do have to tell you that in SEO, every little detail counts.

Something as simple as using attributes can help drive traffic to your website thanks to the positioning of your images and will help in the context to position your articles.

Adding images as part of your content helps your users better understand the topic you are talking about on a certain page or post.

makes it easy for you as it makes it easy for you to add images through the editor and fill in the alt and Title fields (attributes). Let’s see it in this article!

What are image attributes in WordPress?

First of all, if you are lost, I will tell you what these WordPress image attributes are and what they consist of. For this, I have prepared an explanatory video, pay attention!

Attributes are basically labels. html that are embedded when you embed an image on a website. If you access the media option you will be able to see all the images uploaded on your website.

If you click on any of them you can see different fields to fill in. These are the Title and alt (alt text) attributes.

These two fields, on Google’s advice, you always have to fill in between these two, especially the alt attribute, but first I’m going to talk to you about the Title attribute.

Title attribute

The Title attribute is important and by default it is filled with the filename assigned to the image when uploaded.

It is important that when you upload the image to your WordPress you do not do it with the default name when you download it to your computer. Example “12345.jpg”

This is not a good idea, you should assign another more consistent name and since you are going to change it, what better way to take advantage of it to include a bit of SEO.

If, for example, you are talking about motorcycle helmets in the article, it may be interesting that the assigned name includes a keyword or a variant of the main one. Example: “motorcycle helmets”

In this way, this keyword can do its bit helping with SEO to position the image and the article itself.

If you give the file a name with SEO in mind, you are achieving 2 things at once:

1. The image itself will have more strength in positioning.
2. The Title field will thus be automatically auto-filled with the same name assigned in the image file.

Alt (alt text) attribute

The alt attribute is more necessary than the title and although, a few years ago it was a factor to be taken into account for SEO, today it continues to add value to it.

The difference with the title is clear since it is recommended that both be filled in, the alternative text is necessary not only for positioning reasons, but above all for usability.

Why? Because the name you assign to this field will be the one shown to the user if for some reason your browser does not show the image. And for this even more necessary reason, the name assigned in the alt field will be what a visually impaired person “hears”.

For these reasons, it is essential that you fill in this field. Now, since you are going to fill it out, take advantage of the advantages that using it intelligently will bring you if you use it with a view to SEO. For the previous example about motorcycle helmets the alt attribute could be: “motorcycle-helmets).

How to take advantage of attributes for SEO

I recommend that you fill in both fields, although the alt is more important.

The Title is shown in the code that Google reads, if in it you indicate the keyword or word related to the topic you are dealing with, you will be giving Google more clues about the topic you are talking about.

Example: imagine that Google accesses and crawls an article on your website about the best beaches in Andalusia, where you have included an image of the beach in Cádiz within the text.

When it arrives at the image, it reads that it does not have a Title and the alt attribute is empty or has been named with a number such as “1342”. Wouldn’t it be better for Google to find a title for that image and, above all, to find the alt attribute with a name like “playa-cadiz”?

If you do this, you will not only be gaining in usability by offering a text for people with visual problems, you will also be completing the fields recommended by Google and taking advantage of those characters to include a powerful keyword that helps SEO a little bit more.

NOTE: the alt field is designed so that the name you give to the attributes reflects what the image shows as faithfully as possible.

If you know something about SEO and you think that putting the main word in all the alt fields of all the images you will upload more in Google, you are wrong.

Before yes, but that no longer works. Google is smarter than before. We are in 2019 and that has already passed into history, although it still works to force the anchor text in the images to a certain extent. Always without abuse.

Recommended reading:
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How to see the alt texts that my images have?

If you already have some time with your website and you have never bothered to work with the attributes of the images in WordPress, don’t worry, because it has a solution.

The first thing you need to do is figure out which images don’t have alt text. This will be the one that Google sees when it crawls an image without alternative text alt=”” and the one that you can detect very easily.

Likewise, images without a title are reflected like this: Title=””

To see how the different attributes are displayed in your WordPress with views, filling or modifying can be done in many ways.

Using Chrome or Firefox’s Elementor Checker

The Chrome or Firefox Element Inspector is a manual way to see what attributes a particular image has. To do this, go to an article, for example, and click the right button “inspect”.

Click on the little arrow in the upper left corner and hover over the image.

You can now see the title and alt assigned to that image.

The next step is as easy as going to that article to edit the image or looking for it in the media option in WordPress and giving both attributes a suitable name.

Using Tools

There are many tools to detect if there are images on the web that do not have the alt field, for example.

• • Webdeveloper is a very good Google Chrome extension for both design and SEO, but specifically, we need it in this case for a simple function. If you choose the option images “display alt attributes” it shows the assigned alt names of all images in page you are on. You can also use the “replace images with alt attributes” option. It shows the text instead of the image so you can see how it would be seen by a disabled person and by Google itself.

• • Another simple extension that shows which images are without alt is SEO Meta in one click. There are many but this one offers the quick option. If you want to review alt fields that you forgot to fill in, use it. Install the extension and it is as easy as once you have a WordPress page or post open, click on the extension in the images section. This simply and visually indicates the images that do not have the alternative text attribute.

• Screaming Frog: This SEO tool is very powerful to keep your WordPress at bay at the SEO level. It is free up to 500 urls and has the option to see the alt texts you have. Simply analyze the domain and in the “images” tab go to “missing alt text” and you will be able to fix those fields for the positioning of your website.

Plugins to automatically fill alts

Imagine that you have worked poorly on the images on your website and it has hundreds of poorly optimized images.

Ideally, you should worry about completing these attributes manually so that each image on each page or post has those attributes according to the subject matter, but this can be a lot of work. Since it is sometimes not possible due to lack of time, you can use plugins that do this hard work.

The truth is that this may not be a good idea for SEO, but if your site is small and very focused on a theme, one option is to use a plugin that fills the same alt attribute throughout the web.

It’s not ideal, as I say, but it’s better than leaving it blank and at least the alt field this way is displayed with text. Some plugins do this automatically.

We are going to see 2 very simple ones, you just have to install them from the WordPress repository, activate them and you can forget about those empty fields.

PB SEO Friendly Images

It is a very simple plugin to use. If you install and activate it automatically, the attributes of the images on your website will show the same name as the file name with which it was uploaded.

It puts the same name as the file name. This may not be appropriate if before uploading the images to your website you have left a default name such as 22223jh.jpg. Ideally, it should be used to include the main keyword.

But like magic it can’t be done at least the attribute is no longer empty and so the plugin does a good job.

You have the option to click so that the already filled alt and title attributes are canceled and displayed with the same name common to all the images.

The problem is that some you have can get worse and that the title and the alt can be the same, which is not recommended, although this is better than leaving the fields empty, as we have said.

Auto Image Attributes From Filename With Bulk Updater

Another plugin that does the same function but with which you have some interesting features:

• Remove hyphens (-) from the file name.
• Remove underscores (_) from the filename.
• Remove full stops (.) from the filename.
• Remove commas (,) from the filename.
• Remove all numbers (0-9) from the filename.

To carry out the process you have to run the Bulk Updater. To do this, click on the button and an automatic process will be established image by image that will fill all the empty attributes with text.

Tips

• • The main image of the header of each page or featured image of the blog must contain the main keyword that we want to attack. To do this, use a more specific alt and a title with a similar keyword.

• • Use words that are also related to the main keyword.

• • Apply a descriptive text to the alt attribute that is based on the header and context surrounding the image: it is interesting the…