SEO or Search Engine Optimization, guides a search engine (such as Google) through your posts, pages, categories, media library etc to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.

Step #1: File Names (Important for SEO)

Before uploading media to your website’s media library, make sure to edit your media’s file names.

Once you’ve uploaded an asset to the SoCast media library, a URL is created automatically. Image and video URLs contain filenames, which is one reason we recommend naming your files.

Instead of saving your images or files as DSC001234.jpeg, you’ll need to name them properly. Think of the keywords that users will type in the search to find that particular image. Be as specific and descriptive in your image file names as possible. For example, red-peppers.jpeg is better than just peppers.jpeg.

Things to remember:

1. The filename should preferably be short and descriptive.
2. It is always good to use the same keywords in a filename as well as in page/blog title.
3. Do not use filenames such as service. …, or with special characters.
4. Do not use more than 3-4 words in your file names.
5. Separate the keywords with hyphens rather than underscores. For example, red-peppers, not red_peppers

Step #2: Alternative Text (Important for SEO)

Search engines look for alternative text and title in link and image tags. While these make your site more accessible, having good descriptions and keywords helps provide more content for search engines to digest.

Alternative text also helps to improve accessibility by enabling screen readers to read out the alt text for visually impaired users. For example, instead of just ‘baseball’ use ‘Kids playing baseball in a backyard’.

Step #3: Captions (Less important for SEO)

The caption is used to describe the image for users. Use the caption field to add an explanation of the image or to provide further information about it to the reader.

Image captions can potentially be one more opportunity to include your target keyword on the page, but only when it makes sense. Only include a caption if there’s a natural way to do so that won’t take away from the reader’s experience. 

Step #4: Description (Less important for SEO)

This is the descriptive text that shows up on your image attachment page. Any time you upload an asset to your website (e.g image, PDF, video, or audio file) by default SoCast creates a page to host just that piece of content. That page gets its own URL (separate from the image URL) which can contain more information about the media than may be necessary or relevant on its original page.