Images have an important role on web pages and people always love seeing attractive visualizations and photos.
Today we will be discussing how to use image fields in WordPress to improve your content and bring more people to your site. By learning how to use them, you can create better user experiences and more attractive and compelling content.
WordPress makes it easy to add images to your content in several different ways. What you probably didn’t know is that taking a few extra minutes to fill in the “Attachment Details” for your images can improve their communicative value, create better user experiences for your visitors, and bring more people to your site.
Let us explain what Title, Caption, Alt Text, and Description fields are all about and why they matter more than you think.
When you add an image to WordPress, you are actually creating a new Attachment Post. Once the image is added you can edit its Attachment Post by clicking the Media button in WordPress admin. This gives you a list of all the attachment posts associated with uploaded media items on the site.
When you add a new image to a post you can also add so-called “Attachment Details”. These attachment details are probably the most ignored and underutilized features of WordPress.
- Title is the only attachment detail required by WordPress. Title defaults to the name of the file but should be changed to a descriptive title of the image. This is the title of the Attachment Post for the image and just like a regular post the title will define the pretty permalink for the attachment post.
- Caption is the text displayed underneath the image though the exact placement will vary depending on your theme. The caption is not tied to the attachment post but to where you choose to place the image in a post. That means if you use the same image in several different posts or several different places within a post you can have individual captions for each.
- The Alt attribute or “Alt text” is mandatory for images on the web but is often ignored because it seems unnecessary. This is unfortunate because the alt attribute is both important and powerful. The alt attribute is the text that displays when an image does not display.
- The Description field is probably the best kept secret of images in WordPress. When you add text to the description field that text will be stored as post content for the attachment post. That means if someone lands on the attachment post page for the image they will see the long description (provided the current theme supports it).
Combined these text fields are a powerful feature that can be used to create better and more communicative experiences to your visitors and also bring new visitors to your site.
How Google works with this? When the post is published Google will index this alt text. Now you understand what the attachment details are and how WordPress uses images and their metadata. The next step is to start using these fields actively to provide your visitors with better user experiences and get your content indexed in more places.
