When you start to work on your reputation, you think of many different things. Usually, this is done when you are brainstorming ideas. However, there is probably one thing that you have forgotten about – images. Obviously, you remember to have and make images, but putting images up is not good enough. There are wasted opportunities if you have not done it correctly. Throughout this post, we are going to cover many different ways that you can improve your online reputation management just by making sure that you do a few small things. They may sound insignificant, but in our experience, they have done a lot of good. This may be for the fact that many people do not do it, but likely there is something in the Google algorithms that look for it. Either way, these are some of the things that you are going to want to do to make the best of your time improving your online reputation management when it comes to images that you post with your content.

Name the Image

Having just a generic name for your image is not going to help the image to be associated with you or your brand. Therefore, you are going to want to make sure that you name the image with either your name (or brand) or the search phrase you are targeting. Obviously, it would be best to combine the two. If you can only do one, then just pick one. We would suggest that you utilize the search phrase because this will make sure that you get your page, name, or brand associated with that search phrase. This is extremely important when it comes to ranking and domain authority.

Add a Title

Don’t just add any title, make sure it is relevant to the image. Remember, the user will not be seeing this title. This title is for the Google web crawlers. Since they have no eyes, you have to tell them what you want them to know. So, if you title the image the same as the name, you will be doing yourself a disservice. Make sure the title gives a very brief explanation of what the image is showing. For example, if you are adding a title to an image of someone surfing you are going to want the person’s name and surfing in the title. You can replace surfing with surfboard, wave, or even the name of your company if you are producing surfboard. If you want to see what the web crawlers see, then all you need to do is to view the HTML of the page. If you look for the tag “<img src =” then you will see exactly what they see. As you can tell from that, you are unable to actually see what the image is, but it does give you a clue as to what the image is.

Alt Text

Alt text is very important in today’s digital age. The addition of alt text will assist people who are visually impaired to be able to “see” your images. This text will be read to them and they can imagine what the image shows. You don’t want to be too incredibly detailed as there is a section for that. Again, this is just for the broad strokes of what is in the image. This is not a place for keyword stuffing. You will only confuse the person that is trying to “see” the image. After you finish with the alt text, don’t forget to provide a complete description of what is in the image in the description box. This is where you are going to go into as much detail as you possibly can. Essentially, you are going to want to paint a picture with your words. Think of all the books that you have read and how easily you can imagine the things they are describing. That is exactly what you are going to want to do in the description box.

Location

Now that you understand what you need to add to the image, you are going to need to know where and how. If you are a person that knows HTML, you will be able to make these additions as you normally would. However, the majority of us find HTML a complete mystery. For these people, we are going to utilize a content management screen. It doesn’t matter what program or website you utilize as they will all get the job done. However, for our purposes here, we are going to use WordPress as it seems to be the most popular. After you have uploaded your image, you will be provided a popup that will allow you to make these additions. They will be towards the bottom and on the right of that page. They include, URL (which is automatically generated, and we do not suggest making adjustments to this), Title, Caption, Alt Text, and Description. All you have to do is click in the box and use the tips we provided you above to make the alterations.

Repeat

When you are adding images to your page or your blog, it is important to remember to not repeat images. This is bad for two reasons. The first reason is that if you do, Google will not see it as a significant change to your page. The second reason is that it will filter one or the other out of the search results. Google likes fresh and original content. Therefore, duplicating your images will drastically decrease the freshness level of your content. Since Google does not want to display the same image over and over, it is advised to use many different images to maximize the number of results you garner.

Conclusion

In the world of online reputation management, it is all about the little things. All those little things add up to big results. So, make sure that when you are adding content and images to your website or blog, that you do it in such a way that you will be maximizing your efforts. You have taken the time to look at all the other details, why not put a little extra effort into making your images stand out?