How important is writing unique text for each image when bulk uploading images of a subject to my website for image SEO?

Question

Tom Cruise, for example, who is an American and Hollywood actor. I have 500+ photographs of him that I wish to upload on my WordPress blog here.

The problem is not in bulk uploading, but How can we write description of 500 images in bulk for effective image SEO.

For example when we upload an image in WordPress it looks like this →

I think there are 4 things in Wordpress in the Image Optimization →

1. Title
2. Caption
3. Alt
4. Text Description

Suppose we have 500 images, can we append a number to the actor's name for each image?

• Tom Cruise Hot 1
• Tom Cruise Hot 2
• |
• |
• |
• Tom Cruise Hot 500

Is that good and not harmful for SEO?

What is the importance of alt text, description, and caption in search engine optimizations for images? Are there any suggestions how to write for them when the images are in bulk or huge numbers?

In short, how should we handle image optimization if the images are in the thousands, but mostly categorized under one celebrity name.

Answer 1

You should try to adopt a smart naming convention for your image file names since search engines will look at the file name when understanding what it contains. If you can't make the filenames unique with keywords then at least make them unique using Tom's name and a number, maybe also a year, image size, another celebrity in the image or something that can help you distinguish between all images in your library. Like tom-cruise-nicole-kidman-1000x1000-01-2017.jpg

Next, search engines will look at the text content on the page where the image is published. The text close to an image will be associated with the image aswell and help you rank in the search results.

Then we have the image ALT-text. You really should make sure the images have good ALT text. I understand that it can be very time consuming to write unique ALT-text. But you should try. If that is not possible I would recommend that you try to programmatically add the page title or headline to the ALT-text. That way, if you have seo optimized titles/headlines you will automatically have that for your images too.

Regarding harmful for seo. You can name the filenames whatever you like. You will not get penalized for that. But if you give all images same ALT text you might get a penalty for over optimization which will lower your ranking position and maybe even some duplicate content.

Don't forget to resize your images and compress them. You can do that in bulk from Photoshop or plugins.

Good luck @Champion

Answer 2

First off all, I think that it's imperative that everyone understand what an "alt tag" (alt being short for "alternative") is in the first place. The accessibility portion of the Penn State site describes it well: "a clear text alternative of the image for screen reader users."

You may or may not know that individuals who are using a screen reader are living with a visual impairment, or otherwise handicapped. This issue prevents them from seeing the information on a web page. The alt tag's foremost purpose is to help handicapped understand what the image is about. Secondarily, alt tags can help search engine crawlers index an image correctly.

The previous answer provided by Kristian is certainly more efficient, however I caution you to not use any type of programmatic naming convention.

This is bigger than SEO people. I work closely with a company who built a website for Dallas Arboretum, and not long after they launched, they were up against some sort of discrimination lawsuit because one or more visually impaired users did not receive accurate information through the screen reader. They won the lawsuit.

When you write alt tags, be sure to do so with the user in mind. Do not focus purely on SEO nor search engines. Yes, it is an SEO ranking factor - but the factor has more to do with whether or not you wrote the alt tag correctly vs. whether you are stuffing keywords in the alt tag.

According to moz.com, an alt tag should be sufficiently descriptive, but should not contain any spammy attempts at keyword stuffing.

Here is the alt tag test: If you can close your eyes, and have someone read the alt tag to you, and imagine a reasonably accurate version of the image - then you have passed the test.

Further reading is available here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/alt-text.

No website omission is worthy of a lawsuit. Take the time to do it right!