Using images in your content will provide a higher quality reading experience. This will help your users interact with your site, which will give positive site performance indicators. But besides adding images to your site, you can also optimize them to improve SEO.
There are three components to proper image optimization:
Image Title Text
The image title text is not crawled by search engines but may affect your user experience. When a user hovers over your image, a popup will appear with your image’s title text.
To change the title text of an image, go to the post editor where you placed the image.
Hover your mouse over the image and click on the pencil icon, and the “Edit” option will appear. In the “Advanced Settings” menu, you can enter a name for the image.
Alternative Text
Your image’s alt text will tell Google what your page is about. You should change the alt text to the post’s focus keyword on the first image in your post. For other images, use keywords that are variants of the target keyword or describe the image.
To change the image and text, go to the visual editor and hover over the inserted image. Once again, click on the pencil icon, which will bring up the “Edit” option. Details of your image will appear in a popup window. Look for a box called “Alt Text” and enter a keyword or related keyword in that box.
File Name
Your image filename can help your image rank higher in Google Image Search, which can bring additional traffic to your site.
Most of the default image filenames are long and confusing; they’re off-topic. Before uploading an image to WordPress, you should consider the image’s purpose and the keyword you are targeting. Then include this keyword and other descriptive phrases in your image filename.
Also, if you use multiple words in a filename, make sure you use a hyphen between them, as Google will read those hyphens as a space.
This content was originally published here.