Imagine you’ve lost your eye site. How would you want someone to describe what’s in front of you?
When you’re tagging images for your website you need to put your ‘blind person hat’ on because people can look at an image and see its contents, but screen readers and bots (search engine robots) cannot.
Tagging images is good for SEO…
…It’s also a requirement if you want a good page ranking.
If you have images on your website that aren’t tagged, don’t worry. You can start today.
Finally, be descriptive when you’re tagging images, and use keywords when appropriate.
How to tag your images
- Resize your image(s) and put them in a file on your computer.
Here’s what my file system looks like on my iMac. All images are put into a folder called “Assets,” and then subdivided into file names that make sense to me.
- Next, log-into your WordPress website. From your dashboard go to Media —> Add New
NOTE: If your images are already in your media library choose Library. Click on the image you want to tag and begin at Step 6 below.
- Click Select Files
- Navigate to the image on your desktop and click Open
Once you choose your image you will be taken back to the Upload New Media page - Click Edit
- In the Edit Media page add a title
- Add Alternative Text (for screen readers & bots)
- if you do not add an alternative tag screen readers would ‘read’ alternative, which is not a good user experience
- Add a description (can be same words you used in Alternative Text field)
- Click Update
Dos and Don’ts
Don’t use numbers or names that will not make sense to a screen reader, or bot. For example, the image I downloaded from Adobe was named AdobeStock_110326070.jpg. DON’T keep a name like this. Instead,
Do change the image name to something a blind person would understand such as “four-children-playing-tag-outdoors”