Screen readers used by visual impaired or narration software and web crawlers use alt tags (also known as alt-text) to understand what an image is all about.
Similarly, when a browser fails to load an image (due to slow connection, etc.), this is what the browser shows on the screen.
“The more you optimize your posts and website for a blind, the better the search engines will understand your content.”
Back in January, I wrote a post on some of the best alternatives to SEO-friendly images plugins in which I found two plugins which were:
- SEO Image Toolbox
- SEO Image Optimizer
to be very effective in making images you upload on your WordPress blog SEO-friendly by automatically inserting ALT tags.
In this post, I’ll share with you a full tutorial, which will include how to make your image SEO-friendly, and most importantly, automatically.
I use SEO Image Toolbox on BforBloggers. The first thing you need to do is install the SEO Image tool box plugin. This one plugin is enough to handle all your Image SEO optimization efforts.
Surprisingly, this plugin also helps you optimize your links to open in a new tab, helping in a bounce rate reduction of your blog.
After you have installed the SEO Image Tool plugin, go to the Tools menu from your WordPress dashboard. Here, all you need to do is click on the button update tags.
Once you click that, it will take a few seconds for the plugin to update each image’s alt tags. Here in the screenshot above, you can see how the SEO image toolbox updated a total number of 668 alt tags.
This includes images that were having alt tags already and those too, which didn’t.
Click on the Save Settings button to save the new alt tags. That’s it.
The SEO Image Tool Box will automatically generate alt tags for each image you upload based on their name. Remember to rename your image the same as you would like to have your alt tag be.
SEO Image Optimizer is another useful plugin that is more advanced when compared to SEO Image Toolbox.
You can also install this particular plugin if you wish to have more control over your image alt tags. If you want to choose this one, here is the tutorial.
Go to the SEO Image Optimizer menu from your WordPress dashboard. You have to enter what should be added to your images as alt tags in the plugin settings. The available values are:-
- %Site Name
- %Image name
- %Post Title
- %Post Category
- %Post Tag
The settings for the value for the appropriate automatic alt tag generation would be:
- %Image Name
Do not add %category or %tag values. It will get you in trouble with duplicate images.
Click on the Save options. That’s it.
From now onwards, every time you publish a post, SEO Image Optimizer will automatically insert an alt text in each of the images you add to your post.
The best part, this plugin will also compress your images without reducing their quality, hence making your overall site more SEO-optimized. Always remember to name your images/pictures precisely what they are about.
Do you use this technique for your WordPress blog? Share your experience in the comments section below.
What’s next?
Check out our detailed guide on Image SEO and On-Page SEO.
Great share Aayush. Image optimization is often overlooked part of blogging and with these simple tools one can automate everything.
AAYUSH
Thanks for the article on alternatives to the SEO Friendly Images plugin. Per your advice, I added the SEO Image Toolbox to two of my sites, clicked the Update Tags button, and then saved.
On both sites I received two warnings:
Warning: Illegal string offset ‘update’ in /home4/nealumph/public_html/theendlesssixties/wp-content/plugins/seo-image-alt-tags/classes/class-sit-settings.php on line 108
Warning: Illegal string offset ‘delete’ in /home4/nealumph/public_html/theendlesssixties/wp-content/plugins/seo-image-alt-tags/classes/class-sit-settings.php on line 121
What do they mean, and what do I do about them?
Thanks,
NEAL
Hi Neal,
It looks like you are using PHP 7.0 or most probably 7.1 and above (correct me if I’m wrong)
After the 7.1 updates, the undefined path is unacceptable. It should work fine in 7.0 or lower but for the 7.1, you should talk to your host.
They will be able to update the file permissions for your database and core files so that the plugin can create SEO tags in your database.
I would also recommend you to try SEO image optimizer if you don’t want to deal with all that. It dynamically creates the hyperlinks of alt texts so your database remains unaffected. It will work fine in any case.
Awesome way to do image SEO. The plugin is good and I’ve been using to optimize my images though I don’t use its own image compression. I use wpsmush.it for that.
SEO friendly images does do a good job in automatic mode. I have more than 600 posts and it works very smoothly on my blog.
Thanks a lot for sharing this awesome plugin ????
It is good to make images SEO Friendly by compressing your images. You should always reduce your image size for the best performance on web. I use Imageoptim sometimes for my photoshop images.
Very nice article. It is far better than providing image tags while uploading an image to WordPress. These plugins will be going to save my lot of time.