Thread: SEO Friendly Images and how to make them work with Directory

SEO Friendly Images and how to make them work with Directory

Ok this is not a problem its a solution for those of you who are using Directory theme and want to make their images SEO friendly on a global basis.

AS we all know SEO of images is often overlooked and given most of us are relying on customers to load images and invariably they do not remember to input an alt tag or a title for the image, which makes their page less optimised but also our entire site is less optimised as well. If you have a site with a few thousand listings and each one has optimised images then you will likely get a lift overall in your on page optimisation.

I tried a few free solutions but eventually I purchased an SEO plugin called Premium SEO Pack - there is nothing on Appthemes that this competes with so hopefully the name wont get blanked by admin

This plugin is actually quite complex and the main reason I purchased was because they said it would SEO optimise all the images on my site. However it didn't quite work like that...the plugin off the shelf only optimises images that are embedded into a post....not featured images. So this was a problem, however the developers kindly took a look at the Directory theme code and did a mod that enabled them to optimise the Featured Images in each listing. It means you can tailor the Alt tag and Title tag for every image and include in there some extra text such as description of your business, main url, focus keywords etc etc.....you don't need to rely on the Advertiser to be aware of what is required.

This is a nice feature and I have suggested to them to list their product with Appthemes...but maybe they will or not I dont know. However this mod is working on Directory theme.....maybe Spartac you could add this code into your theme and we dont have to worry about having it overwritten each time you do an update.

Posting here for anyone who wants to SEO their images (but requires the plugin):


In the single-listing.php file:

Change from

<?php the_listing_image_gallery(); ?>

To

<?php

ob_start();

the_listing_image_gallery();

$listing_image_gallery = ob_get_contents();

ob_end_clean();


$listing_image_gallery = apply_filters('psp_listing_image_gallery', $listing_image_gallery);

echo $listing_image_gallery;

?>

The alt tags and title tags are rendered in the HTML output, so you need to browse the page source code to see the changes.....

Enjoy!