You must use these WordPress features for best practice.

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Without these WordPress features you’re missing a bet.

First of all I hope that you have been using Alternative Text for all your images.  This is an SEO must.  When you have added media and the image is present in your blog editor, click once on the image and then click on the picture icon (hereafter I’ll call this ‘edit image’).  In the Alternative Text area type in a phrase or sentence that matches your keyword.  Click here for a previous blog on this subject.

There are other WordPress features that many overlook.

Your image is invisible to search engines if you don’t fill in the alt. text and title lines.  Did you know that with the title filled in that a mouse over the image will “pop-up” what you had written as the title?  I didn’t know that.  Now I’ll go back and improve my previous blog’s images.  That is one of the great WordPress features to take advantage of!

Consideration for the disabled is another benefit of the alt. text line, they will be able to know what item is an image.

While we are at it, there is a trick that isn’t one of the WordPress features, but is a good idea.

Consider how uninformative an image name like AH45Jkl.jpeg is.  How much better if your image file name accurately represented the image.  Then if someone should download it there would be a good chance that they would be able to recognize it.

Speaking about WordPress features, do you regularly add a caption to your image?  This yet another opportunity to get a message across.  Since we are such visual creatures, that might be the text a viewer will read!  It helps with SEO as well.

Before you publish the blog there are a few “Cleaning up” tasks to perform.  It is important to preview the post to see how everything looks.  Especially when dealing with images, one of the WordPress features dealing with image size I find to be very useful.  If your image sticks out into the sidebar you can just change the size to make it work.  Go to “edit image” and click on the appropriate % choice and “Save Draft”.  The click on “Preview” to see if you like the change.

If your image would look better placed differently with a text wrap (see above) then you can choose to do that.  If your image needs a border to set it off from text then you can do that in “edit image” – “Advanced settings”.  Here is an earlier post about how to use some of those advanced WordPress features.  I hope these tips help and that your blog presentation improves because of them, Yours in success, Brian