It’s Valentine’s day again and it’s the season for giving love and getting some right back. Now, I can’t help you land a quick date, but what I CAN do is share a sweet little resource about optimizing your WordPress site for usability and search.
Pamela Wilson of CopyBlogger posted 7 nice tips on how beginners can make quick improvements to their sites. She covered some key areas such as cleaning up your permalinks and maximizing the use of your footer. My favorite tip is probably number 5, where she gave a quick discussion on why you need to optimize your images and how you can do it. This is what she wrote:
The title tag for your image generates the helpful little text that appears when someone hovers over that image…
Again — they need to make sense. If it’s a story about tires and you’ve used an image of a muddy tire, don’t just call it “Tire.” Call it “Best Tire Brand for Muddy Roads,” or some other text that describes what people will find in your content. And make sure the alternate tag accurately describes the image you’re showing. This isn’t a place to stuff random keywords, it’s just another way to make it crystal clear what your site is about.
It sounds pretty simple, but a lot of people either forget, intentionally neglect, or just don’t know what to do with image-related fields. What you need to remember is that these fields add another layer of relevance to your content when done right, and search engines are designed to reward content that’s relevant to search queries. Bottom line, better optimized images put you in a better position to rank well for your target keywords.
Pamela discussed six other nifty WordPress tricks that you can sink your teeth on if you follow the link above. Did she miss anything? Share some of your own tips in the comments section below.
Later,
Andy “The Interwebs Cupid” Jenkins
P.S.
All works that are charged with love and passion have that extra edge in them that can’t be faked. If you’re sincere and focused on Internet marketing, success can’t be far behind. Happy Hearts’ Day!
