Let me tell you a story. Not too long ago, I wrote a quick post talking about HDR photography. I put some HDR photos on my website and wrote a quick description about them, thinking little of it at the time. A few months went by, and much to my amazement, those images had grown into a significant source of traffic for Blinq’s website. How did I do it? There were no programming tricks or hacks, no smoke and mirrors. I just paid attention to the rules of image SEO.

Pictures are something that we humans naturally “get.” We look at them and instantly understand what they’re about. The same can’t be said for the programs Google uses to search the web for useful content. They can’t “decode” an image in the same way we naturally can.

Put simply, we need to help the programs figure out what’s in our images.

That’s why images also have alt and title tags. By saying something relevant to the image in either of these tags, you ensure that Google knows what your image is about. You don’t need to jam every possible search query into these tags. By merely using them at all, you’re miles ahead of the crowd.

So, do you want to know how I got traffic just by posting an image? I put the following description into its alt tag:

subaru HDR 3 by exxx2005 HDR Photography Tutorials by Paul Stamatiou

This description hits on a lot of different searches people might enter into Google. Maybe they want to learn more about HDR photography. Maybe they’re interested in Paul Statmatiou’s work or Subarus. By placing these keywords in the alt tag, I’m giving myself the best possible chance of ranking high for these common HDR-related search terms.

Here’s where you need to enter it if you’re editing the HTML directly:

You’ll want to place the description in the “ alt = ” section. If you’re a WordPress user, you can place the same description in the Alternate Text box of the image editor. Be sure to fill in the caption and description sections too. The more written content surrounding your photo, the better.

Surprisingly, that was nearly all I had to do get the image to appear whenever people search for the term HDR photography. Want me to prove it? Here are the recent stats from my website’s search engine analytics.

As you can see, the search “blinq hdr” counts for nearly 3% of my total traffic. Imagine that! All I did was put an image up on a website and properly describe it. Easy.

Do be careful, however. You still need to follow all of the other rules of SEO. You need to write solid content around the images you’re putting on your website. That means writing an article that’s at least 350 words long. Don’t forget to provide your audience with substantial content, not just a bunch of images with links.

Here’s the big takeaway. Google can’t read images any better than you can read binary code. They’re one big blur of pixels. Help Google out. Properly describe your images by using the alt text and other tools WordPress offers. You’ll soon find yourself getting a lot more traffic from the images you post.

We’ve almost fully utilised the power of Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. Last time, we went through some of the more advanced individual post settings and discussed why it’s important to keep certain pages and sections out of Google’s index. In a nutshell, you want Google to see the pages with lots of written content and few external links. Other pages, such as your login page, are like leaks in a faucet. They siphon off your total page rank, ultimately harming your chances of ranking well for certain photography related search terms.

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In the last post, we installed the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and got to work on tweaking our blog posts for the purpose of SEO. We learned about the importance of picking the right focus keywords. This is all in an effort to bring in more traffic from our local area. After all, that’s where we’re most likely to get new clients.

I gave you a homework assignment in the last post. If you haven’t done it yet, please don’t continue to read this. What we covered in the [intlink id="wordpress-seo-installation-guide-for-photographers" type="post"]previous post[/intlink] is more important than what we will cover in this one. You need to get it done first. The rest is important, but it’s mostly the icing on the cake. You’ve got to get the fundamentals down before you can use it.

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We recently worked with Melbourne Photography company Blinq Photography. This was originally posted on their website, but we thought it would also play a role on ours.

As most you would know, Photography and SEO, the two are rarely uttered in the same sentence. Photographers and other creatives often eschew the technical stuff like maintaining websites so they can do the awesome stuff like taking amazing pictures and pleasing their clients. I can’t blame you. I am you. And that’s why I’m so excited about Yoast’s new WordPress SEO Plugin.

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