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.

Title: In this episode, I failed to mention the title tag.  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.

ALT Tag: 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.

Alt tags also help search engines categorize images in their image search, which can help your pages and posts to show up in more results.

Description: 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.

Caption: 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.

Some people use image captions for describing the image. Think a condensed one-sentence version of the image description. You’ve probably seen this in print newspapers and magazines that lists the names of the people in an image left to right.

Other people use the caption field to display the image copyright information and that’s what I suggest you do on your radio station website. No matter where you get your images from, they should have the name of the image copyright holder. If someone on your team took the image, place their name or the station’s name here. If you purchased the image from an online service, paste in the service name. (i.e., iStock photo, Getty Images, etc.) This can protect you down the road. If there ever is any claim to the image, you’ll know who the image belongs to.

Benefiting your Visitors: So, in explaining these three image meta fields, I’ve shown how adding ALT tags, descriptions and captions can benefit your website. How does it help your visitors? People with vision impairments such as low vision and blindness may use screen readers to access the internet, or just have trouble distinguishing images. Screen readers will read the alt text out loud, as well as image descriptions, depending on what settings the user has enabled. Alt text and image descriptions can provide essential information such as text, links, and image details.

Read up on the “Americans with Disabilities Act” (ADA) or “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines” (WCAG)

Having image meta for the visually impaired is especially important if you are selling something on your website. If you don’t offer these tags, you can be tagged for alienating a segment of the population and that can become a legal issue.

Hopefully, this episode will motivate you to populate these fields moving forward.