How Image Meta Data Helps SEO and Your Visitors

<p>It’s probably safe to say that when most people upload images to their station website, they neglect adding additional meta information they should. We’re talking about the ALT TAG, DESCRIPTION TAG and the CAPTION. Most of the time these three meta fields will NOT appear on the frontend of your website, but if you DO add them, it can help your website grow and help a special segment of your visitors.</p> <p><strong>Title: </strong>In this episode, I failed to mention the title tag. &nbsp;The title is the only attachment detail required by WordPress. This defaults to the name of the file but should always be changed to a descriptive title of the image. It's important to always change this because you can also use the title to search for images within your media archive.</p> <p><strong>ALT Tag: </strong>If I had just one search engine optimization tip to give, it would be to add alt tags to every images. As everything has been becoming more visual, search engines are putting more value on these tags than other copy in your post or page.</p> <p>Alt tags also help search engines categorize images in their <u>image search</u>, which can help your pages and posts to show up in more results.</p> <p><strong>Description: </strong>An image description tag gives more details than alt text and allows someone to learn more about what is in an image. ALT text gives the user the most important information while image descriptions provide further detail. The description field can hold as much information as you want. It doesn’t have to be short. It can be like the ALT text, but longer and can contain keywords, or even metadata from your camera on how you took the photo, copyright etc. You can even add links in the description field.</p> <p><strong>Caption: </strong>The caption field is easy to understand. Unlike the ALT text or description, the caption does not have to closely mirror what the image shows.</p> <p>Some people use image captions for describing the image. Think a condensed one-sentence version of the image descri