Comment on WordPress SEO by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO The landscape image code is generated as a background image (it’s CSS code), so there’s no value in SEOing them, they won’t increase (or decrease) a pages rankings as they aren’t indexed by Google.

You could easily change the code from being a background image using CSS to a standard image (so it would be counted SEO wise), but it wouldn’t be easy to change the name of the image to match the content of the post with WordPress (this is part of the template and something like that would have to be plugin generated and not related to the theme per se), but it would be easy to add an alt attribute using the title of a post etc…

I considered using banner images that are indexable etc… in the theme and adding relevant alt text to those images, but decided against it as it’s going a little greyhat SEO since the landscape images have nothing to do with the content of each post, so it would be adding more SEO because we can and not because we should (if you know what I mean :-)).

You have to be careful with this type of SEO, it’s easy to get carried away, for example I could have smiles (which can be images in WordPress ;-)) to have relevant alt text, but it’s crossing into that grey area of SEO and though you might get away with a couple of iffy things like this, do too many or get a manual Google reviewer on a bad day or before they’ve had their coffee and you might get a penalty! I’ve had sites penalised where I thought I was 100% whitehat SEO, so better keep one step away from the grey areas.

If you have posts with no images you could add images from a set of images, like a money image for posts about money and give it relevant anchor text (I see this sort of thing on some sites) and there might be plugins to automate this. I tend to shy away from that sort of SEO as it’s a grey area that I could see a Google manual reviewer not seeing it as whitehat SEO: I see it as greyhat SEO and I’ve broken plenty of Google’s guidelines to test SEO ideas to see just how close to the line we can safely go: I’ve found a BIG step from the line is advisable, if it’s iffy don’t do it unless you are happy to have the site banned by Google forever.

David