It is a great idea to add pictures in your blog posts. They not only help attract your readers to read your posts, but can also help you rank higher in the search engines. Pictures are worth a thousand words, so you can see how they help attract readers to actually read your posts, but how can Google and other search engines see pictures as an advantage and rank your site higher up in their search results?

This Brings Us To Our 3rd SEO For Wordpress Tip: How Use The <ALT> Tag For Your Images

You are probably asking what in the world is and ALT tag anyway and how is this going to help me with SEO?

- To keep it simple and ALT tag is simply the description of your picture or image.  This is Not visible to your readers,

However;

- This description will shows up on your readers screen if the actual image for some reason does not load/display on their browser. Your reader will then see the description of the picture where the picture would have been.

- By using this description <ALT> tool will also help people with impaired vision who rely on different screen reading technology in order to view web pages.  Where the screen reader will actually read the text within the <ALT> tags from the image.

Now comes the biggest kicker as to why you should always use the <ALT> tag for your images!

- ALT tags are very helpful when it comes to Search Engine Optimization!

- The search engines use the information you provide in the description/<ALT> tags to further classify the overall content of your blog or website.

- In other words the search engines use the description of your images as KEYWORDS!!!

- So if you want to rank higher on certain keywords then make sure that your main keywords are present within the <ALT> tags or description of your images.

So How Do You Insert A Description Into Your Images?

Well if you have a regular website that uses HTML you can use this code:

<img src=”http://yourdomainname.com/image.png”  alt=”Here is where you put your image description”/>

OR….

Wordpress Makes this process even more simple.

- Use your WordPress image uploader to add an image to your post (This can be done by clicking the Add an Image button right next to the Upload/Insert text within your Add a New Post page, OR by going to media –> add new–>Select Files –>Select your image and press ok

- After you selected your image you want to upload there will be a screen that should pop up that looks like the following:

- In the box that says description you want to type your description of the image this is what will be shown in your <ALT> tags also remember to put your main keyword within this section to help with SEO.

- When you are finished Click the save button or if you insert into post button depending on where you inserted your image from.

Till Next Post,

Krista

***If You Like What You Read Feel Free To Share It!

Over the next couple of days I will be going through some easy quick fixes you can make to your blog in order to get a higher ranking in the major search engines and get more traffic overall!

Tip of the Day Number 1 : Using Custom Permalinks

What is a Permalink?

Each blog post is assigned their own permanent web site address (URL), this a called a permalink.  This link is automatically generated when you publish a new post.  The default permalink in Wordpress looks like the following:

http://yourdomainname.com/?p=100/

where the p stands for post, and the 100 is just the ID that is assigned to that particular post.

However, in Wordpress you can customize your permalink to be more search engine friendly!

Why Should I Customize?

If you want your site to be ranked higher in the search engines, customizing your permalinks is a must!  When you customize permalinks, you are automatically inserting keywords into the URL of your posts.  This will allow for search engines to reconize the keywords in your post and include your site in searches done on those search keywords.  One of the biggest things search engines look for when determining what sites to put in their results and their ranking, mainly depends on the keyword typed into the search and the keywords the search engine retrieves from different websites.

The default permalink in Wordpress is not keyword friendly what so ever!  It does not contain any keywords at all, its just a number of your post.  If you were to change the default to a custom permalink structure, you can automatically include the titles of your posts, which will then give you that keyword in your URL.  The custom format that I currenly use looks like this:

http://yourdomainname.com/2009/04/09/my-post-title

where when you break down the URL it is, year/month/day/your post title

How Do You Change Permalink to Make it More Search Engine Friendly?

The good news is that this pocess is fairly simple!!!

To choose the permalink settings you want to:

1.)  Go to settings menu (at the bottom of the left side bar in your Wordpress admin dashboard)

2.)  Click on Permalinks (the Permalink Settings page should open it looks like this:

Here you will see the different options you have to customize your permalinks.  You will notice that the default box is selected under the common settings section. This is what we want to change!

3.)  You want to Select the Custom Structure box.

4.)  You can then type in the permalink setting you want. So lets type in the new permalink!

To make the permalink look like this:

http://yourdomainname.com/2009/04/09/my-post-title

Type:   http://yourdomainname.com/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

**Make sure that you put the slashes before/between/at the end of each tag

**Also by changing the permalink structure will affect the permalinks for previous posted material as well

5.) Click SAVE when you are finished

Below is a quick guide of what you can put in the customize permalink:

%postname%     =    The name of your post separated by hyphens (your-post-name)

%category%      =     The category name of your post

%post_id%          =    The ID of the post (ex. 123)

%author%          =     Post’s author

%year%              =     Year of post

%monthnum%  =    Month of post in numbers (April= 04)

%day%                =     Day of post in number

Hope this helps!

Till Next Post,

Krista

***If You Like What You Read Feel Free To Share It!