Last May, with remarkably little ballyhoo, Google substantially changed the way it delivered search results. It’s surprising that there wasn’t more of a ruckus, given that people care deeply about their Google rankings. My inner librarian weeps for how much search engines are used and how little understood.
In any event, one of the highlights of PodCamp was when John Ellis tackled this subject head on. And here’s a great take-away….
Search engine optimize (SEO) your images. With the new Universal Search, images often show up at the top of a generic Google search. There are three easy ways to do this:
- Give them great filenames. For example, to SEO an image of myself, I could name the image happy-web-diva.jpg or anna-belle-leiserson.jpg, instead of my usual abl.jpg.
- Use the alt attribute. Hopefully you are all doing this anyways, as this is a well-documented requirement for making web pages accessible.
- Add an image caption. Actually it’s been a concern of mine that it’s not easy to caption photos in WordPress. I’ll plan on trying the Image Caption plug-in next time I use a photo.
Thanks, John, for a most helpful presentation.
Thanks for listening. Glad I could help.
-John