WordPress gives you some pretty cool tools for managing your images and other media. Let's look at the ones that will help you with your site SEO and user experience.
To start, you will need to log in to your site as the admin (ex:https:yoursite.mynny.biz/manage). Once you are logged in, select "Library" from the "Media" menu in the left hand side. It looks like this:
This will take you to your Media Library where you can see all of the different media (images, videos, etc) that you have uploaded to your site so far.
NOTE: you can use the "Add New" option to add images if you have not already done that.
Next, click on any image that you see in your Media Library. This will open the "details" panel. It should look something like this, only with your cool image, not my boring one:
We want to focus on the right hand side of the screen.
Alternative Text:
This box is what screen readers use to describe the image so that people will visual impairments can "see" what is on your page. This is also the text that will appear when someone hovers over the image with their mouse pointer. This field should have text in it and it should be descriptive AND use keywords that might help with searching.
Example: this site is for business people, so when I write my description I want to use the word "business" somewhere in it. Perhaps something like, "Small business owner walking on pavement with a leather briefcase". Describe what the image actually shows in 100 characters or less.
Title:
This text is what will appear on the page if the image does not load properly. In most cases this will be more concise than the Alternative text. WordPress will prefill this with the name of the image, but that may not be the best option for SEO. Look at the file name we have! There is no SEO value to that!
Example: We suggest you come up with a short description that uses some of your keywords like, "Small Business Owner" or "Small businesses on the go".
Caption:
A caption generally appears below the image on the website. This can be handy for giving credit to the photographer, providing details on the location of the image and so forth. If you need it, use it - otherwise you can leave it blank. Do not use this to describe the picture - that's just annoying.
Description:
The description field is unique to WordPress. Think of it as the "hidden caption" field. Whereas captions are always visible to the site visitor, the description only shows up if someone has the option to view the image by clicking on it, and only if your theme supports it. Most people would put the same kind of information in this field as they would a caption. The description field can be a great place to put in product description and sku number of the image if you have a store.
Here is a quick visual overview of the alternative text, title, caption and description fields of our WordPress image:
Final thoughts:
While this might seem a bit overwhelming, you do not need to fill out all of the boxes for all of the images. the
two MUST haves are the Alternative text and the Title. Additionally, you can edit your images one at a time as you get time. Each image you work through makes your site more accessible and it makes it more searchable. It is a pretty small tweak that can give you huge rewards.
