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Should I re-name all of my blog photos?
Posted by CreativeJunkie • 1/15/09 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: blog photos, driving traffic with images, googling blog photos
When I post a photo, I don't name it any special way, except what makes sense to me. So, I may name a series of photos flower1, flower2, flower3 and so on, and that's how I upload them to my blog.
But I've been reading that people googling images can find your blog from them.
When I upload a photo to my blog (I've got a wordpress.org blog), I have a screen that asks me:
Title (which is, by default, the name I gave the photo on my hard drive);
Caption (I usually leave this blank)
Description (I usually leave this blank as well)
Link URL (I never fill this in as I'm uploading from my own hard drive and I assume it's necessary only if I'm linking from another site).
My questions are:
1) How should I now be naming my photos? Should I be using a more descriptive title? Should I be filling in a caption? Or description? Out of the three, is the title the most important?
2) Can I/should I go back to all my uploaded photos (ugh, the thought is overwhelming) and change the titles to more descriptive ones? Is that even possible? Or will it screw up my posts and links and such?
User Comments
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good point... i click on a lot of photos that take me to peoples blogs!http://momsjustwannahavefun.blogspot.com -
Oh yes, I get traffic off my images all the time
Also it's good file management
me-in-mexican-hat-1999 dot jpg is really clear -
I never really thought about this but naming pix is a great idea. Yes, name them! Instead of flower 1, do something like the name and color of the flower and maybe even the word flower. That way you'll get hits for the color, flower species, and the general word flower. Great idea you came up with! -
Good!
Does anyone know how I should complete those fields? If I use a descriptive title, do I also need to add the caption, and description?
And am I going to screw anything up by going back and re-titling all the published photos on my blog?-
yes and then cross link to your images from a few places on other sites
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realistically, it might actually help because the google bots my see a change . However I might be wrong on this
images.google.com.au/images?hl=en&q=tony hogan&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
that's me with the guitar
oh look, my manuscripts as well, what a surprise ;-) -
Jeez, I never thought to cross link to a photo. Thanks for the insight AG. -
@acousticguitarist
images.google.com.au/images?hl=en&q=Tony+Hogan&btnG=Search+Images
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It is my understanding that in the html of the image you should add alt tags, which are similar to the article tags. But I'm still learning, so it will be interesting to know what the SEO experts around here say.
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If I use a descriptive title, do I also need to add the caption, and description?
Yes you should complete these fields. The Alt tag should have something if only the file name of the image. Without an alt tag, Google will likely fail to index your images correctly according to the keywords you select. Note that it takes up to 6 months for Google image search slow crawler to find your pictures, but it will miss your pictures altogether if you don’t use alt tags correctly.
Without a title tag, no ‘hover text’ will show up when the mouse passes over your image. Hover text is a useful way of letting your readers know what’s in a picture.
onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/how-to-fix-alt-and-title-image-tags-in...
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I have to eat dinner now. When I get time I'll return with instructions for you. -
TT, is the hover text and the alt tag the same thing?
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What is an alt tag? And where is the html of my image?
I'm sorry for such basic questions! -
With wordpress 2.7 self-hosted and wordpress.com the “title” field is both the “alt” and the “title” text for an image. Wordpress 2.7 will automatically place the image file name (without the extension) in this field when you upload an image, but you can change it before you insert the image into the post or page.
To change older images in posts or pages in 2.7, open the post for edit, click on the image and then click on the edit image button that appears at the upper left, and there you can change or add a title (alt). Then make sure and click the “update” button.
Warning: Don’t just go into the HTML tab in the post and change or add it there. That will NOT update the image in the media library, it will only update the HTML link in the post or page. -
It appears this is an area I need to look more closely into.
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It truly is important. Doing it right does bring in hits and I can attest to that. For example on my blogging tips blog I have had 417 hits in a 60 day period on one image alone. As I use free images and not that many of them, and the result of editing in this information benefited my blog, I should think that anyone who has an image rich wordpress blog ought to make the time to update this information. It will be worth while to do so.
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As always TT, thank you so much!
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@creativejunkie
You're welcome
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I have one particular image that draws in visitors from a Google search everyday, but I knew nothing of alt tags or anything of the sort at the time I wrote the article. I don't know if possibly they are coming from the name of the article or the name of the image. Although, they are from an image search. I will have to look more closely. Even though I have had a blog since April, I am still very much a noobie.
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Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. -
Here is what Matt Cutts says about this..
www.patdoyle.com/alt-tag-for-images-can-bring-more-visitors-from-google/193...
Very informative. -
yes -
I get a lot of image search traffic for my thrift blog-- and I've basically been naming the photos descriptive things based on what's in the photo. It's taken a little while to get them indexed, but now I'm getting steady traffic from them.
Instead of, say, flower 1, naming it redrose or pinkdaisy will probably help you the most in terms of search traffic.
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