SEO Friendly Images

This blog post was going to rock. It was going to help a lot of people get free traffic to their sites. This is how this post was going to go…

Have you ever seriously considered SEO for images? I know it’s kinda dull, and perhaps the last thing you are thinking about when you are writing a blog post.

However, Google likes to rank your images as well. And perhaps, if you play your cards right (maybe you have a full house?) you will get lots of free traffic as a result.

I have written about this before, and have tried it out myself over the last six months. It is surprising the kinds of traffic that actually comes from your images.

Wouldn’t it be great though, if there was a plugin that could help automate the attributes you need to fill in, in order to take care of image SEO.

I mean it’s only two fields – the alt and title attributes. So it should be simple right?

Drum roll please… there is such a plugin. It’s called SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images Plugin for WordPress

SEO Friendly Images was a fantastic WordPress plugin to help optimize your SEO.

What did SEO Friendly Images Plugin do? Basically it automatically updated all images uploaded to WordPress with appropriate Alt and Title attributes.

But the big question for most of us is, how exactly did it do this?

…here is where the trouble began!

It doesn’t work. Hence I used the past tense in the last few sentences.

This post was going so well, but it was based on a very dangerous assumption:

“The plugin works”.

I know, there have been countless reviews of this plugin and recommendations on various sites. So you were convinced too, right?

But there is a problem many bloggers have. They don’t have time. And they have to cut corners.

I did the same on my earlier post: 45 Best WordPress Plugins. I had used the majority of these plugins, but could not possibly test them all. So I used references from respected blogs for the rest.

Big mistake.

Configuring SEO Friendly Images

It actually happened while I was testing and configuring the plugin for this review.

The config page for SEO Friendly Images is actually quite simple.

And this is what I was going to write about it:

There are two fields you need to be concerned with for this plugin, the alt and title fields.

You can pre-populate them with the following information from your post using the following special tags:

• %title – post title
• %name – image file name (without extension)
• %category – post category
• %tags – post tags

Basically you just have to use one or more of these terms (including the %) and copy them into the alt and title fields.

Then when you add an image to a WordPress blog post, it will add this information for you.

And then I ran into the bug.

It does not add this text, in any way shape or form.

I tried it while adding images. While editing images. While saving posts. Re-opening them. And so on.

I checked the forums and saw many complaints over a long period of time.

I found other obscure references to this plugin not working. But I kept looking, hoping to find a tip or trick to get it to work.

Surely someone would have noticed.

And then I struck gold. Finally, a reply from the plugin developer.

“This plugin is no longer supported.” But if you pay for the pro version, it will work. And you get loads more features. Ok.

I can understand that developing and supporting a plugin takes time, and the developer needs money.

But it took me an hour to discover this. I guess the expectation, or hope, is that frustration will drive us to buy the pro version once you realise the free one is broken? And, the pro version only costs $79 for a single site license ($149 for multi-site). A bargain, right?

So I  tried some similar plugins, even though they don’t really seem to be used, supported, or well reviewed. And the results were the same. Disappointment.

Takeaways

Don’t assume – it can make an ass of  you and me. You know that old gag. It seems to be very true in this case.

But, I guess the WordPress plugin world is full of dead plugins, so this should not really be a surprise.

It is just ironic that this plugin is still so well reviewed and listed, even recently. And it seems to have not worked for over a year.

Header Photo: Erwan bazin photography (F2.8) I’m back! via photopin cc

Broken Glass Photo: nils.rohwer via photopin cc