Simplified Method To Add Alt Tags To Your Post Images

A few days ago while stumbling through a curation trail on a post from @donkeypong, I came across a series of posts by @princewahaj about performing SEO on your posts here at Steemit.

These are great posts and I highly recommend reading all of them.

I understand that Steemit posts are gaining more and more search results throughout the rest of the internet and that can't do anything but help us all.

I like to actually put into practice things I learn so I used the keyword tools @princewahaj recommended in this posts and decided to write a post about How to Cut a Watermelon so I could get some real life practice.

Yeah, that phrase actually shows up in a keyword search and since I already had a watermelon I used this as an excuse to get my 15 year old off the PS4.

However, when I tried applying alt tags to the images on my post, it frustrated the shit out of me because, well, it didn't work.

If you right-click on an image and scroll down to "Inspect", this is what you'll see, the blue highlighted box on the right is the info for the image and I've highlighted the alt text in yellow.

In a nutshell, search engine algorithms still can't "see" what is in an image (not yet anyway) so alt tags are a way to manually enter information about that image so the search engines can include that in their computations.

It's a great way to improve your search results (as long as you don't do it in a spammy way).

I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong.

I cut and pasted the html command into my post and tried placing it in every conceivable way onto the post and the damned thing still wouldn't work.

I literally spent about 2 hours trying to figure it out.

I watched videos from Google on how to do it, I read about 5 or 6 articles I found online and it still refused to work.

Eventually I did what I probably should have done first and did a search here on Steemit.

Hmm, it was really easy.

Here's what you see when you place an image in your post in Markdown (that's what you use to "Submit a Story")

Note: I highlighted the image text in yellow, yours won't be yellow.

The alt text in this instance is "watermelon alt.JPG".

It turns out that Markdown gives you an easy shortcut for adding alt text.

Right after the exclamation point at the start of the code, there are 2 brackets "[" "]" and whatever is inside those brackets is the alt text for your image.

Sometimes there isn't any alt text and you see an open and closed bracket right next to each other.

To add more than one string of alt text enclose the first set in double quotation marks, leave a space and then enclose the second set in single quotes.

Here's the alt text for that first watermelon image:

I manually entered the alt text "How to cut a watermelon" 'a juicy watermelon'.

You can verify your alt ext by right clicking the image and "Inspect"ing it.

It may very well be possible to enter the alt text in that right hand inspection window, but I know how easy it can be to screw up code like that so I only look there, I never touch.

Anywho, I've taken up enough time but I hope that there are people here who go at Steemit in a professional manner and that this little tidbit can help.

Blah, blah, upvote, follow, resteem @theblindsquirl