When writing a blog are you including photos, videos, and infographics? How about charts and graphs? Market reports and media other than text? Did you know that Google and search engines CAN'T READ IT?
Thats because search engines and computer can only see text. They can't SEE the image or video so you need to tell it what you want it to see.
Several years ago black hat SEO-ers would cram hundreds of keywords into the back end of images and videos just for search engines but Google, of course, quickly put the kabosh on that and penalized those pages with keywords stuffing of any kind. But we still need to tell the search engines what is on the page.
Why?
Because there are so many factors to SEO and you don't want to miss one if you really want your post or content to be found on the search engines. Tagging and titling your images and video will do just that. It's a way to complete the optimization on a post or page. You want to give Google as much information as you can about what the post or page is about and that includes more than just the basic content. The more complete the information is on the page, the better Google will be able to categorize it and rank it for what you want it to be found for.
Make sense?
Let's say you want to sell a house. Would you just put the picture of the house on a bulletin board? Probably not. It doesn't give the potential client much information. What if you just put the description or the address? Still wouldn't be very much to go on. Nothing to really draw the buyer in.
Now what if you had an image, QR code to a video, address, description, price and as much information as you can provide? Chances are you would have more interest in the property than if you had left out a vital piece of information.
Same goes for search engines. To get your information to the potential reader, you need to give as much information as you can. That includes titling the post correctly, adding in a description or a great first paragraph to grab the attention from the search results, video with descriptions (from YouTube) and images with ALT tags.
ActiveRain lets you do it two places. They allow for a title and a description. I put the same information both places to really hammer home the concept of the image. This is the text Google will see behind the image. It knows there is an image there but unless you tell it what it is, it will have no idea and you can lose that valuable SEO variable.
Read more: The Difference Between Image Title and Image Description
So whether you are on WordPress, ActiveRain or any other websites, make sure you are tagging your images and pictures with your keyword that you want to be found for. Often times it can be the same as you title just like I have done in this post.
Comments(62)