Dan

Which theme are you using? I will test it and try to replicate the situation

Did you test by giving it a title=”” attribute? If so, this is not what i am referring to. I’m referring to the main title/name you give to label an image with when you upload it into wordpress. This is all it needs, the alt text is generated from this.

Hi Jamie, instead of needing to content manage two separate fields, this plugin is based on the recommendation that you just give the image a title and that’s enough. No need to duplicate that info in the database for a separate alt field, which would usually be identical to the image’s title in the image library. Just write the main title of the image manually, then insert it into a post or page, and so long as this plugin is active, it will insert alt text into the html of that image on that post or page at the point of inserting the image. It will utilise the image’s main title. This saves space in the database, and makes it easier to manage image names and alts because you only need to edit in one place per image, like what could be done prior to WordPress 4.7

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by Dan.

Hi planetexpress, sorry for the late reply. I’ve just checked the source code of that URL and the only empty alt tags I can see are on the gravatar images, is this because you’ve fixed things already or are you needing this plugin to solve the gravatar alt texts also?

Hi Wainer, which part of the plugin doesn’t work for you? Is it when inserting images into posts/pages (if so, are you using the default wordpress editor or the unique Divi pagebuilder?) or is the problem with the automatic parts of the theme like header/footer/category listings?

Please share a link so I can take a look

It’s very safe, don’t worry, as it doesn’t change any settings, it only adds alt text to the outputted image HTML in 2 ways:

* on the fly for template pages (such as category pages). so no settings are messed with (so you can always deactivate the plugin and it will be like it used to be)

* at the point of inserting an image into a post, so where the image code is inserted into the post, there is some alt text there too. insert an image into a post after activating the plugin and see the difference. deactivate the plugin at any time and only the posts that you’ve inserted images into since the plugin was active will remain affected (by having alt text in the images that were inserted since the plugin was active)

so it’s really quite harmless, and yet very important for seo. without alt text google will be clueless what your images are about.

Hi, it renders alt text from the main title of the image in the media library, so no settings are changed in any way, it only adds alt text into the HTML code of the image that gets inserted into the post at the time of inserting it. It also filters images used in theme templates, such as category pages, to add alt text the moment the thumbnail HTML code is rendered.

It doesn’t backdate images that were inserted into posts before the plugin was installed – this would involve editing the post HTML which could annoy people who have already hand-crafted the HTML of their posts, so you will need to install & activate the plugin then re-insert each image that has a title in the media library but lacks alt text in the post. Any images inserted prior to WP 4.7 will have had alt text inserted in a similar way to how this plugin does it, so you only need to re-insert images that were inserted into posts since the time of updating to WP 4.7

Yes, there are some technical reasons why it’s not worth automatically using image captions as alt text. Human written titles typically make perfect alt text, but human written captions are typically too lengthy for alt text and are already visible on the page – these two effects are both bad for SEO. To elaborate:

* Image alt text is “semi hidden content” and is therefore automatically treated with extra suspicion by search engines when scanning for “keyword stuffing” which is an old fashioned spam tactic. So if images have chunky alt text, especially if the images are small, it can be interpreted by search engines as “keyword stuffing within semi hidden content”, so the site’s rankings could get penalised/lowered in search results.

* Captions are visible on the page beside the image, so for search engines and screenreader-assisted users (the people we make alt text for) the caption appears twice (in place of the image and beside the image) – this is a bad user experience and will be deemed by search engines as minor “duplicate content” which is at worst a spam signal and at best a sign of editorial incompetence so rankings may fall further.

References
These articles don’t go into detail on this particular issue but they do provide context & explanation of the technical SEO terms used in this answer.

Keyword stuffing: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358

Hidden text: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353

Duplicate content: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359

Duplicate content & Keyword Stuffing: https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a

Hi Ralf, yes, there are some technical reasons why it’s not worth automatically using image captions as alt text. Human written titles typically make perfect alt text, but human written captions are typically too lengthy for alt text and are already visible on the page – these two effects are both bad for SEO. To elaborate:

* Image alt text is “semi hidden content” and is therefore automatically treated with extra suspicion by search engines when scanning for “keyword stuffing” which is an old fashioned spam tactic. So if images have chunky alt text, especially if the images are small, it can be interpreted by search engines as “keyword stuffing within semi hidden content”, so the site’s rankings could get penalised/lowered in search results.

* Captions are visible on the page beside the image, so for search engines and screenreader-assisted users (the people we make alt text for) the caption appears twice (in place of the image and beside the image) – this is a bad user experience and will be deemed by search engines as minor “duplicate content” which is at worst a spam signal and at best a sign of editorial incompetence so rankings may fall further.

References
These articles don’t go into detail on this particular issue but they do provide context & explanation of the technical SEO terms I’ve used here.

Keyword stuffing: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358

Hidden text: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353

Duplicate content: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359

Things to Avoid > Duplicate content and Keyword Stuffing: https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Dan.
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I’d also like this feature please. It’s not ideal editing the plugin code which gets over-written each time the plugin is updated. This is far from ideal, it’s terrible, and can so easily be fixed if the plugin author allows it.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Dan.

I also don’t see Latest Note column on pages, only on posts… is this a plugin bug, or intentional, or something wrong with my setup?

Hi Guido, during the time we were debating the issue, I found a different plugin to meet my needs. It simply offers a meta box on each page where I can type in a meta description for that page. That is a more powerful feature than having a homepage-only meta box in the settings part of the dashboard, but it doesn’t create excessive extra things like Yoast’s SEO plugin does for example. Therefore I feel no need to try your plugin any longer. But for anyone else who tries yours first and has my experience in SEO I’m sure they will give a decent review if they feel inclined to offer any feedback. I guess people rarely have an incentive to provide feedback unless they have constructive criticism to offer though. Not sure what can be done to encourage them ??

Also, all the slugs you’ve edited since installing, even if they are valid slugs, will revert to the wordpress default slug prior to any edits. Because this plugin doesn’t work with the native slug editing functions. So you will lose years’ worth of edited slugs. Sami please develop the plugin so it stays passive during simple slug changes that wordpress is capable of managing natively!

This sounds very similar to my request: when a slug is modified use the native wordpress slug modification functions and only force an override in cases where the native response is unsuccessful (adds “-2” or otherwise changes the attempted slug edit)

If you can do this, it would be a perfect plugin with huge advantage and no drawback. But currently the shutting down of the native behaviour for all posts and pages irrespective of where it may be sufficient is a huge drawback. It doesn’t do this on categories though – it has a separate slug input box! We need something like that for posts and pages.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by Dan.

i don’t use anything like yoast because it comes with loads of unwanted features, such as sitemaps and redirects etc which are not actually good for seo on a site that’s already clean & tidy. all i wanted was a meta description on my homepage, but no way would i duplicate it on every page – if people really care about having a meta description on every page to change their appearance in google, they will also probably care about their rankings in google so should avoid this.

if you can add a setting, maybe a checkbox, so we can select sitewide or homepage-only… then it would be a perfect plugin for my needs, but as it is, it would only do my site a lot of damage.