Picture Paste to the Rescue!
If you’re using WordPress and trying to do frequent and informative posts to build SEO and provide content for your site visitors, you’re probably doing a lot of image insertion as well. It’s a fact that images enhance the visitor experience, so photos or screen shots always make a post a little more interesting.
However, with WordPress, you have to upload the image and go through those image properties boxes, and it takes a bit of time. What if you could simply copy an image or take a screen shot from the Web and paste it right into a WordPress post? No, it’s not a new WordPress feature, but it is a small software application for Windows that makes it possible.
This image was copied from the PicturePaste.com website and just pasted into this post. There was no upload necessary, though it is now in the Media Library in WordPress in case I want to use it again.
What you’ll find is that if you use this software you’ll begin to use more images in your WordPress posts because it’s faster and easier. It works with Internet email clients as well.
How many of your site visitors do you think know all of the ins-and-outs of your IDX search function? How much more likely would it be that they would return to your site over and over if they knew how to use your IDX search properly; all of the features?
All you have to do is to take some screen shots as you do some IDX searches and use PicturePaste to put them into a blog post. Add text under each screen shot explaining what it’s about. You’ll find it’s really easy with this software, but more important, you’ll find that placing a link to this tutorial post on IDX pages will increase your traffic and your return visits.
I am not sure this is going to be good for SEO. Images help if they are titled and have an alternate tag. I also link my images to IDX searches. I would love to know your thoughts on this because I like the idea.
I think the real value of PicturePaste is its ability to take screenshots and instantly paste them in WordPress posts just like you would a word or a paragraph of text. Without a tool like PicturePaste, this process usually involves clicking [Print Screen], pasting the screenshot into an image editor, cropping and resizing, saving as a JPG or similar file, then uploading the file in WP.
Whether you copy and paste with PicturePaste or manually upload through the normal WP media upload process, either way you should definitely add an ALT tag to your images. If you add images using PicturePaste, you can still add ALT text: after you’ve pasted it into WordPress simply click the image and a little button with a mountain icon should appear in the upper right of the image. If you click this button you can specify ALT text, titles, or other attributes.
As a heads up, Google only indexes ALT tags, so I’d place #1 priority on ALT tag naming. Provide ALT tags that accurately describe what is IN THE IMAGE, ie: “map of Irvine homes for sale from my MLS search” so Google knows what the image is about and how it supports the page/post content.
TITLE tags can help your users, but as far as Google is concerned, they don’t index title tags for images on your page. HOWEVER if your image is linking to a page, Google will use your image TITLE tag to help identify the page your image links to, such as “search the MLS for homes in Irvine”.
Whether you use PicturePaste, WordPress, or another tool to get images in your posts – you’re right, ALT tags are a must! And if your image is linking to another page of your site, an image TITLE tag may help Google rank the page the image links to.
Rather than using a third party app, use the WordPress app to post an image based post to your blog or site. The app is available from both iTunes and Google Play store. The app allows you to embed photos or video from your phone’s gallery directly into a post or page or create a post that is an image.