Beginner’s Guide to Image SEO – Optimize Images for Search Engines

Here’s something that might surprise you: images can be just as important for SEO as your written content. Yet many business owners upload images straight from their camera or stock photo site without any optimization at all.

We’ve seen websites lose potential customers simply because their images took too long to load or weren’t properly tagged for search engines. On the flip side, we’ve also seen sites double their organic traffic just by implementing basic image SEO best practices.

That’s exactly what this guide will help you achieve. We’ll break down everything you need to know about image SEO in simple, actionable steps that any beginner can follow. By the end, you’ll know how to make your images work harder for your business.

Here is a brief overview of what you will learn in this article:

Optimizing Your Images for SEO and Speed

Page loading speed plays an important role in SEO and user experience. Search engines consistently rank fast websites higher. This is also true for image search.

Images increase your overall page load time. They take longer to download than text, which means your page loads slower if there are several large image files to download.

That’s why you need to make sure that images on your WordPress website are optimized for the web. This can be a little tricky to get used to since many beginners are not experts in graphics and image editing.

The best way to optimize images is by editing them on your computer using photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop. This allows you to choose the right file format to create a small file size.

You can also use an image compression plugin for WordPress. Image optimization plugins allow you to automatically reduce file size while uploading an image to WordPress.

You can learn more in our handy guide on how to properly optimize images before you upload any images to your website.

What Is Alt Text?

Alt text or alternative text is an HTML attribute added to the img tag which is used to display images on a web page. It looks like this in plain HTML code:

<img src="/fruitbasket.jpeg" alt="A fruit basket" />

It allows website owners to describe the image in plain text. The main purpose of the alternate text is to improve accessibility by enabling screen readers to read out the alt text for visually impaired users.

Alt text is also crucial for image SEO. It helps search engines understand the context of the image.

Modern search engines can recognize an image and its content by using artificial intelligence. However, they still rely on website owners to describe the image in their own words.

Alt text also accompanies images in Google image search, which helps users understand the image and improves your chances of getting more visitors to your WordPress blog.

Usually, alt text is not visible on your website.

However, if an image is broken or can’t be found, then your users will be able to see the alternate text with a broken image icon next to it.

What Is the Difference Between Alt Text vs. Titles?

Alt text is used for accessibility and image SEO, while the title field is used internally by WordPress for media searches.

WordPress inserts the alt tag into the actual code used to display the image. The title tag is stored in the WordPress database to find and display images.

In the past, WordPress also inserted the title tag in the HTML code. However, it was not an ideal situation from the accessibility point of view, which is why they removed it.

What Is the Difference Between Alt Text vs. Captions?

The alt text is used to describe the image for search engines and screen readers. On the other hand, the caption is used to describe the image for all users.

Alt text is not visible on your website, while captions are visible below your images.

The alt text is crucial for better image SEO on your website. The caption is optional and can be used when you need to provide additional information about the image to website visitors.

How to Add Alt Text, Title, and Caption to Images in WordPress

Alt text, title, and caption make up the image metadata that you can add to images when uploading them into WordPress.

When you add an image using the default Image block, WordPress allows you to add a caption and alt text for it.

WordPress automatically generates a title for the image from the file name.

You can change the title by expanding the image’s ‘Advanced’ block settings. Here you will find a ‘Title Attribute’ field where you can add your own custom title for the image.

You can also edit the alt tag and title for the images that you have already uploaded to WordPress.

To do that, you need to visit the Media » Library page and find the image you want to edit.

Simply clicking on an image will bring up the attachment details popup.

Here, you can enter alt text, a title, a caption, and an optional description that is displayed on the attachment page.

When to Use Captions for Images in WordPress

Captions allow you to provide additional details for an image to all your users. They are visible on the screen for all users, including search engines and screen readers.

As you may have noticed, most websites don’t normally use captions with images in their blog posts or pages. That’s because captions are often not needed to explain an image.

Captions are more suitable in the following scenarios:

• Family or event photos
• Photos that need additional explanation describing the background story
• Product image galleries

In most cases, you will be able to explain the image in the article content itself.

Using All in One SEO to Automatically Manage Your Image SEO (Recommended)

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market, and its Image SEO addon will automatically set your alt text, image titles, captions, and more. It will also add a proper image sitemap and other SEO features to improve your SEO ranking.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the All in One SEO plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin. To use the Image SEO feature, you will need the Plus plan or above.

Upon activation, the plugin will launch the setup wizard automatically. You can learn how to configure the plugin in our guide on how to set up All in One SEO correctly.

Now you need to navigate to All in One SEO » Search Appearance and then click on the ‘Image SEO’ tab. After that, click the ‘Activate Image SEO’ button to enable the premium image SEO features.

Setting Automatic Image Titles Using All in One SEO

When you navigate to the ‘Title’ tab on the Image SEO page, you can choose a title format using smart tags that will be automatically used to generate title attributes for your images.

For example, adding the ‘+ Image Title’ tag will automatically use the image title used in the WordPress media library.

You can also add other tags, such as your website title, strip punctuation from the title, and change its capitalization.

Setting Automatic Alt Text Using All in One SEO

Next, you can click on the ‘Alt Tag’ tab to automatically format the alt text of your images.

By default, AIOSEO will simply use the alt text from the media library. If you like, you can also add your website’s title and other information to the alt text of each image on your website.

All in One SEO’s Image SEO addon can also automatically generate image captions, disable attachment pages as we’ll cover below, and much more.

Related: See our guide on how to automatically generate image alt text in WordPress using AI.

How to Disable Attachment Pages in WordPress

WordPress creates a page for each image you upload to your posts and pages. It is called the attachment page. This page just shows a larger version of the actual image and nothing else.

This can have a negative SEO impact on your search rankings. Search engines consider pages with little to no text as low-quality or thin content.

This is why we recommend that you disable the attachment pages on your website.

Disabling Attachment Pages Using All in One SEO

The easiest way to do this is by installing and activating the All in One SEO plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, it automatically turns off attachment URLs. You can also manually turn off attachment pages in WordPress by visiting the All in One SEO » Search Appearance page and clicking on the ‘Image SEO’ tab.

From here, make sure that the ‘Redirect Attachment URLs’ option is set to ‘Attachment’.

Attachment pages will now be redirected to the images themselves. This means that whenever a search engine or visitor goes to the URL for an attachment page, they will see the image instead of the attachment page.

Disabling Attachment Pages Using Code

You can also disable attachment pages by adding code to your theme’s functions.php file. The safest way to do this is with WPCode, the most popular code snippets plugin that makes it easy to add code snippets in WordPress.

The best thing is that WPCode comes with a built-in snippets library where you can find all of the most popular WordPress code snippets, including disabling attachment pages.

First, you need to install and activate the free WPCode plugin. For more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, head over to Code Snippets » + Add Snippet. You need to search the snippets library to locate the Disable Attachment Pages snippet.

When you hover your mouse over the snippet, you will see some buttons.

Simply click the ‘Use snippet’ button, and a new snippet will be created for you.

All you need to do now is toggle the ‘Active’ switch to the On position and then click the ‘Update’ button. You have now successfully disabled attachment pages.

If you are familiar with code, then you can also do this manually by adding the following code directly to your theme’s functions.php file.

function wpb_redirect_attachment_to_post () {
if ( is_attachment() ) {
global $post;
if( empty( $post ) ) $post = get_queried_object();
if ($post->post_parent)	{
	$link = get_permalink( $post->post_parent );
	wp_redirect( $link, '301' );
	exit();
	}
else	{
	// What to do if parent post is not available
	wp_redirect( home_url(), '301' );
	exit();
	}
}
}
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'wpb_redirect_attachment_to_post' );

Additional Tips to Improve Image SEO

Adding an alt tag is not the only thing you can do to improve image SEO. Following are a few additional tips that you should keep in mind when adding images to your blog posts.

1. Write Descriptive Alt Text

Many beginners often just use one or two words as the alt text for the image. This makes the image too generic and harder to rank.

For example, instead of just ‘kittens’, you can use ‘Kittens playing with a yellow rubber duck’.

2. Use Descriptive File Names for Your Images

Instead of saving your images as DSC00434.jpeg you need to name them properly. Think of the keywords that users will type in the search to find that particular image.

Be more specific and descriptive in your image file names. For example, red-wooden-house.jpeg is better than just house.jpeg.

3. Provide Context to Your Images

Search engines are getting smarter every day. They can recognize and categorize images quite well. However, they need you to provide context to the image.

Your images need to be relevant to the overall topic of the post or page. It is also helpful to place the image near the most relevant text in your article.

4. Follow the SEO Best Practices

You also need to follow the overall SEO guidelines for your website. This improves your overall search rankings, including image search.

5. Use Original Photographs and Images

There are many free stock photography websites that you can use to find free images for your blog posts. However, the problem with stock photos is that they are used by thousands of websites.

Try to use original photographs or create quality images that are unique to your blog.

Video Tutorial

Expert Guides on Optimizing WordPress Images

Image SEO is just one aspect of optimizing images in WordPress. You might like to see some other guides related to improving images on your WordPress website.

• How to Optimize Images for Web Performance Without Losing Image Quality
• How to Properly Add Images in WordPress (Step by Step)
• How to Add Featured Images or Post Thumbnails in WordPress
• Tools to Create Better Images for Your Blog Posts
• Great WordPress Plugins for Managing Images (Updated)
• How to Create an Image Gallery in WordPress (Step by Step)
• How to Easily Lazy Load Images in WordPress
• How to Fix Common Image Issues in WordPress (Easy Guide)
• WebP vs. PNG vs. JPEG: The Best Image Format for WordPress
• Where Does WordPress Store Images on Your Site?

We know that most bloggers are not photographers or graphic designers. Luckily, there are some great online tools that you can use to create graphics for your websites.

We hope this article helped you learn about Image SEO for your website. You may also want to see our guide on how to fix common image issues in WordPress or our expert picks for the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools.

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