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If you do not use images in your writing, you can ignore this. Being a writer, I miss some obvious SEO stuff sometimes. This one came across my desk today from Website Magazine. This is why I love the publication so much. They don’t assume you know anything. The mix of articles works for advanced administrators and beginners…but I digress.

The point is, I had no idea I could improve my SERP (Search Engine Results Placement) by using “alt” and “title” tags on images. This helps me at places like Xomba where I post twice a month and must add an image. Some other sites like Bukisa will let you do this as well. I guess what you don’t know can hurt you.

You should use only the “alt” tag if your photo does not link to any other page. When the photo links to another page, you can use “alt” and “title”. This way, you can get another search phrase or two into the article. This is great when you are unsure of the best keywords and want to use a few related keywords or long-tail keyword phrases.

Here is an example of how to do it:

When you add a photo, WordPress gives you the option of adding a title, caption and description. This is the code it produces when you fill out the Title and Caption fields (Caption field also adds alt text automatically):

[caption id="attachment_641" align="alignleft"
 width="225" caption="alt text"]
<img src="http://www.killfive.com/wp-content/
uploads/2009/09/example-photo-225x300.jpg"alt=
"alt text" title="title text" width="225" height="300" 
class="size-medium wp-image-641" />[/caption]

If you don’t want a caption, just delete

 [caption id="attachment_641" align="alignleft"
& width="225" caption="alt text"] and [/caption]

If you are adding a photo elsewhere, you only need to add two tags to get the same effect without the “add image” application to help you. In that case, here is the standard code that just adds an image, without changing its size or other attributes:

<img src="http://location of image.com">

To change the size, do a little math to be sure you are scaling each attribute by the same rate and add the size tags like so:

<img src="http://location of image.com" 
height="height in pixels" width="width in pixels">

You can add other attributes as well to change the position or horizontal and vertical space around the images as well. For now, let’s keep to the most common and get back to the reason I’m writing in the first place, alt & text tags. Simply add them to the end of the code, just before the last “>” symbol. You only need a single space between each tag/command.

<img src="http://location of image.com" 
height="height in pixels" width="width in pixels"
alt="alt text" title="title text">