SEO and Pinterest friendly images

Pinterest is great for driving traffic to blogs but it is also good at getting bloggers to optimize their images for on-page SEO.

When we create images for Pinterest choose attractive images that help tell the story of your post.  We now add text to images to help Pinterest pinners know what our blog content is about. These images help visitors to quickly scan the image and know if the post is of interest.

Thanks to Pinterest, bloggers are seeing images as an important content element and they are also optimizing their images for search.

On-Page Image Optimization

Naming image files:

We’ve been telling students and clients that before they upload images to the WordPress Media library they should give the image itself a descriptive name that includes keywords.

Instead of finding a stock image online and uploading it to the media library with a long non-descriptive name, bloggers are turning to free online image editors such as Canva. 

Canva is a free online image design tool that is great for Pinterest users, bloggers and website owners. Use Canva to easily create beautiful images for your site and your social media channels.

If you don’t name your image, Canva will create a name for you from your image text. This makes it easier to give image files keyword-rich names before uploading an image to the WordPress media library.  The image in this post is named “SEO-Pinterest-images.jpg” a name that helps Search Engines know what the image is about.

Image ALT Text:

Bloggers are now paying attention to image ALT tags because of Pinterest.  When visitors pin images from your blog to Pinterest using a pinit button or social sharing plugin the image ALT text is automatically used as the pin description.

Pinterest is making bloggers pay attention to the image attributes for Pinterest reasons but this is good news for the on-page SEO of their site. Optimizing images for Pinterest is good for your blog.

We strongly recommend using the Social Warfare plugin for social sharing – it gives you a separate field for pin description, leaving the ALT text for accessibility purposes.

Adding ALT Text in WordPress:

You’re probably already familiar with the Image Attribute panel that displays in WordPress when you Add Media to your blog post (or a page). Get in the habit of adding image ALT Text when you upload an image to the WordPress Media Library BEFORE clicking insert into post.

If you need to go back and add or edit ALT text. Here’s how

• Click on the image in the WordPress visual editor
• Click on the pencil icon
• Image Details screen will pop up
• Edit the Alternative Text
• Click Update

Thanks to Pinterest WordPress users are naming images and adding ALT text that is descriptive and keyword rich.