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Hey everybody, Mike Linville here from Black Dog Education with another
installment of Office Hours today's question came in from a visitor via e-mail in the question
really had to do with the WordPress media manager and you know it's funny because this
is a question we get all the time. As custom developers we used to struggle with building
graphical interfaces where you can load up images and crop and do all this other stuff
so realistically the media manager that's available in WordPress is actually powerful
the problem that we have is that it's not necessarily as intuitive as maybe we would
like. So one of the things we're going to do in an upcoming version of this is we're
actually going to go through and maybe rundown of the top five things that people would like
to do within the media manager in terms of loading of images, cropping, or resizing and
things of that nature. But you know for the time being what I want to do is answer the
question because even if the images aren't exactly the way you want them to look, search
engine optimization and work for the search engines is definitely going be important so
I what I wanted to do was to make sure that we had that piece handled. So any time you're
using the media manager or anytime you're adding any kind of image you know, whatsoever
to, to WordPress site or to anything else like that there are 4 pieces of information
that you want to make sure that you got covered. The first thing is you want to make sure you
give your graphics a meaningful file name. Things like Google images and other kind of
search tools are out there know your images on your website can now come up in the search
but if your image is named like image 337.JPG or something like that that's a meaningless
so instead of saying image 337 give it a meaningful name call it a birthday party or e-mail icon
or whatever the cases is, give it something meaningful use either hyphens or underscore
characters that separate the words and make it a meaningful image. The second we're going
to want to do is make sure that you give it a meaningful title now when you're adding
images to WordPress it actually asks you for the title if you're doing outside of WordPress
you can use the title tag to make sure you give your image and title and this again is
something the search engines are going to take a look at and it's going to help them
kind of understand what the information is about on your page because they obviously
don't know what the image's about we can use alt tags and title tags to describe that to
the browsers the third thing like I mentioned was an alt tag, so you want to make sure that
you put alt tags on every single one of your images. Basically what an alt tag is, is that's
the text description of the image that shows up if for some reason your web browser has
a problem loading up that graphic. You've probably noticed that if you move your cursor
over an image of a little box pops up and has some words on it, that the images alt
tag carriages if you're in Firefox that's the title tag. So you wanna make sure that
you got both. And the last thing we want to talk about is making sure you have your images
scaled properly now using height and width tags within an image tag is not the right
way to scale an image so for example if you have an image that's 10 inches by 10 inches
square but you want to take up a small portion on your website you're not going to want to
upload the entire graphic and then crush it down with height and width tags cause what's
going to happen is your web browser needs actually download the full size 10 x 10 image
and then it's going to use the height and width tags that are on that to crunch it down
and make it fit the better solution is going to be to actually resize the image either
in the WordPress media manager which we'll show you at a later time or you know in Photoshop
or gimp or some other sort of photo manipulation tool before you loaded it up. That;s going
to make sure your page load times are much faster and for the search engine optimization
that can be really beneficial so again the four things that we talked about, helping
out your search engine optimization make sure you give your image files of meaningful name,
make sure to use alt tags, make sure to use title tags, and make sure that you scale the
image properly and don't try to put 15 foot wide image onto a web page. Scale it to make
your pages load faster to look a lot better so if you have additional questions please
make sure that you send them over to us it's, officehours@blackdogeducation.com my name
is Mike Linville and I appreciate you being here.}