Are you an artist or a photographer who relies heavily on WordPress for designing your portfolio or blog? If answered yes, chances are high that you are not leveraging all the tools that are there at your disposal or you’re not adhering to the best practices which could assist your website in standing out. Photographers often commit many mistakes which keep them from achieving the desired effect of their blog. Here are few that you should avoid committing and the reason behind it.
Mistake #1: Non-readable filenames of images
In order to optimize images for search engines, filenames of images are the most vital factor. If you still don’t know what non-optimized filenames are, DSC00023434.jpg, 20113456-tda-1198.jpg or picture1.jpg are few of the examples. The aforementioned filenames may work when you archive photos in your software program but they are nothing but useless when used on web. You should use descriptive keywords in filenames as this will help spiders and search engine robots to get a clear idea about the picture. For instance, shark-attacks-california-surfer.jpg can be a good optimized name.
Mistake #2: Empty title and alt attributes
Search engines usually have a tough time in interpreting content of images. The more relevant the text is around the image, the easier it will be for the search engine spiders to decipher the relevancy of the content of the image. The ‘alt’ attribute offers alternate text to describe the image when the browser has disabled image loading. This is essential for the usability of your site in case your readers have bad eyesight or they’re utilizing assistive reading technology. The ‘title’ attribute is there on the tags which can be visible when you mouse-over an image.
Mistake #3: Website isn’t cached
Do you think that a poorly loading website is hurting your photography business? Photography websites usually load lots of bigger images which are the main reason for a slow-loading website. If you create a cached version of the photography website, you could easily speed things 10X faster. There are necessary plugins for that. W3 Edge offers the W3 Total Cache Plugin which reduces the loading time of your website, leading to faster page loads.
Mistake #4: Lack of CDN
The closer are your visitors to the content, the sooner it will load. If you don’t know what a CDN is, it is a Content Delivery Network which is a team of servers located through different places of the world comprising of similar copies of the media content. So, when a person in New York loads your website, they will be given content from the nearest data center which might be located in New Jersey instead of data from the server which might be located in Hong Kong.
Therefore, if you want to add the best stock photos to your website, you can follow new site selection and QA guidelines please. Take into account the above mentioned blunders and try your best to avoid them in order to get best results.