This article will answer frequently asked questions and provide you with the guidelines for how to get images to appear in search.

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to refer to Google as it’s the most commonly used search engine. But the guidance in this article are best practices that can be applied to any search engine.

Can You Force Search Engines to Display Images?

The short answer is no, you can’t make search engines display images in search results.  Search engines decide what they feel is the best way to display the results, and they do this on a per-search basis, depending on the search term entered.

Do Images Show in Desktop and Mobile Searches?

Yes, it is possible for images to appear in desktop search results but mostly images will only appear in mobile search results.

Most search engines have moved to a mobile-first approach because they’ve seen most searches come from mobile devices. So it’s best to optimize your site, content, and images for mobile devices.

Optimizing Images for Search Engines

There are a number of things that you can do to improve the chances of your images appearing in search results. Below are the details of how to optimize images in your content.

Make Images Responsive

Most searches occur on mobile devices such as phones and tables. This means that your content and images need to be responsive (respond to the size of the screen used to view your content).

Most good WordPress themes should handle this for you, but be sure to check your content on your phone to see how it looks. Attention should be paid to how the image appears, how content around the image looks, and how long it takes to load the image.

Web.dev has a good article on making images responsive here.

Use High Quality Images

Images attract attention, so making sure your images are sharp and high quality is important.

High quality images are usually a contributor to page load times, so ensure you use image optimization techniques to compress the file size. There are a number of great WordPress plugins that can do this.

Use Descriptive Filenames, Captions, Alt Text and Titles

Your images should have filenames that describe what the image is. For example, large-orange-striped-cat.jpg is better than img1234.jpg or image1.jpg. Use hyphens and not underscores in filenames, i.e. black-cat.png not black_cat.png.

Add descriptive Alt text to your image and, if appropriate, a descriptive caption. Both of these really help search engines understand your image much better. Avoid the temptation for keyword stuffing.

The Image SEO addon for All in One SEO Pro can automatically add Alt text, titles, and captions to your images, so it’s a great feature, especially if you have a lot of images.

Optimize the Placement of Images

Place important images as high up in your content as possible. Search engines will typically use the first image they see in search results, so the first image should be the most important.

Optimize the Content Around Images

Always ensure that the rest of the content around your images, and your page or post where the images are embedded, are optimized.

Ensure you’ve added a good SEO title and meta description. You can easily do this with All in One SEO. Check out our article on Setting the SEO Title and Description for Your Content here.

Add the correct Schema structured data. Again, this can easily be done with All in One SEO. Check out our article on Setting the Schema Type for Individual Content here.

The TruSEO Content Analysis features in All in One SEO can help you optimize your content around focus keywords.

Remember Your Visitors

You should always optimize your content for your audience. Search engines want to see helpful content that is informative and interesting for your audience, and that offers something unique over the billions of other web pages on the Internet.

This goes for images as well. Avoid the stock image trap where every business site uses the same stock images. Make your images unique and reflective of who you or your organization are.

Make Your Images Discoverable

Once you’ve written great quality, helpful, unique content, and optimized the content and images, you now want to ensure your images can be found by search engines.

First, make sure the page or post is publicly accessible. Search engines can’t see content that’s behind a login or paywall.

Next, make sure your content and images appear in your XML Sitemap. You can check this by going to All in One SEO > Sitemaps and click on the Open Sitemap button on the General Sitemap tab.

Depending on your Sitemap settings, you’ll either see a list of all your content, or a list of sitemaps that contain your content, i.e. one for posts, one for pages, etc. If you see a list of sitemaps, click on the relevant one to see all the URLs.

Once you’ve located the URL for your content, you’ll see a column for Images that lists the number of images contained within that content.

If you right-click anywhere on the page and select View Page Source you can search for the URL of your content and see a list of the images.

You can submit your XML Sitemap to search engines using their Webmaster Tools. We have an article on submitting your sitemap to Google here and one for submitting your sitemap to Bing here.

Additional Information

Google has a number of articles that cover this topic in more depth. You can find these articles here:

• Add an image to Google search results
• Google image SEO best practices
• Mobile site and mobile-first indexing best practices

The short answer is no, don’t bother with Meta Keywords.

The Keywords meta tag used to be used in the early days of search engines. However, they quickly became useless to search engines as they were abused.

Major search engines such as Google dropped support for Meta Keywords back in 2009.

Here’s the announcement from Google back in 2009 that they no longer used Meta Keywords in ranking.

It’s possible that Yandex, the Russian search engine, may still use them as they do list it in their documentation here. If you’re looking to get on Yandex for Russian searches then you can still use the Meta Keywords feature in All in One SEO.

However, if you’re primarily concerned with ranking on Google and Bing then you don’t need to worry about adding Meta Keywords to your site.

This is a common way for plugins to connect to and communicate with WordPress.

However, some plugins may block access to the REST API. This can include security plugins and CDN services that have an option to block all communication with the REST API or just allow communication for logged in users.

All in One SEO only communicates when you make changes to the plugin settings, which requires that you’re logged in to your site and in the WordPress admin area.

If access to REST API is blocked, then you will see a red warning notice at the top of the screen as shown below.

If you see this notice, try deactivating each plugin one at a time until the notice goes away. This should indicate which plugin is blocking access to the REST API.

If the problem still happens after deactivating all plugins, then switch to the default Twenty Twenty theme and see if the notice goes away.

If you’re using Cloudflare, we have a related article about Unable to Save Settings Due to Cloudflare Firewall Rules here.

Officially Supported Browsers for AIOSEO’s Admin Area (all features expected to look as great as they perform):

Desktop Browsers:

• Google Chrome: Latest 2 versions
• Mozilla FireFox: Latest 2 versions
• Apple Safari: Latest 2 versions
• Microsoft Edge: Latest 2 versions
• Opera: Latest 2 versions

Mobile Browsers:

• Android: latest 2 versions of Chrome for the most recent stock Android version
• iOS: latest 2 versions of Safari and latest 2 versions of Chrome for the most recent iOS version

Additional Browsers:

• Desktop browsers with > 1% usage based on can I use browser usage table

The official answer from Matt Cutts at Google can be found here –

Here’s an updated answer from John Mueller at Google in his Q&A session –

The short answer is that you can’t make Google display search results like this.  It happens on a per search basis depending on whether they feel it’s the best way to display the results.  Their official answer is “We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user.”

However, there are some things you can do to help Google, these are:

• Implement good page structure
• Make sure your navigation menu matches your page structure
• Use breadcrumbs
• Set good anchor text on your internal links to important pages
• Make sure that the text you use as your page titles and in your headings is informative, relevant, and compact.
• Ensure that your internal links’ anchor text is concise and relevant to the page they’re pointing to.
• Avoid repetitions in your content.

You can read more about this on Google’s Search Console Help page here.

Once a language reaches 90% translated, the language pack can be installed on your WordPress site.  You can do this by going to Dashboard » Updates » Translations and you’ll see an Update Translations button if there are available language packs for your site’s language.

Please note that the release of plugin language packs is controlled by WordPress.org and not the plugin developers.

If you’re interested in contributing translations, you can do so on WordPress.org here.

Further reading: Translating All in One SEO.

In our API documentation you’ll see snippets of code that provide examples of how to use the specific API filter or hook. There are two ways you can safely add this code to your site:

1. Perhaps the simplest solution is to use our WPCode Insert Headers and Footers plugin. You can use this plugin to add snippets of PHP code to your site. We have documentation on how to use this plugin here.
2. Add the code to your child theme – Depending on the theme that you have, you may be able to create a child theme and add code to the functions.php file in your child theme.  You can find details on how to do this in the WPBeginner article here.  If you add code to your theme then it could get wiped away when you update the theme so always use a child theme.

The answer can vary depending on a number of factors. It can take anywhere from several hours to several weeks for Google to index your content.

For most content, it’ll take around a week.

Here are some things you can do to speed things up according to Google:

1. Make sure your server is not overloaded.
2. Link to your new content prominently from elsewhere on your site.
3. Avoid filling your site with unnecessary internal links.
4. Use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console.
5. Ensure your new content is included in your XML Sitemap (All in One SEO does this automatically for you).
6. Keep your site’s content quality high.

For more information on the above, check out this video from Google.

You can follow this article for Checking Index Status of your content in Google Search Results.

Reasons We Need Administrator Access

Plugin and theme developers may ask for temporary access to your site in order to troubleshoot a problem. It’s usually safe to provide this access provided you follow some simple rules. These are:

• Don’t give your password out to anyone. Always create a temporary user that you can delete after the person is finished helping you.
• Always back up your site before giving out access. Use a good backup plugin such as UpdraftPlus. Make sure to back up the WordPress files and the WordPress database.
• Remember to delete the temporary user once the person is finished helping you.

Adding a New User to Your Site

Follow these steps to create a new temporary user on your site with Administrator access.

1. Log in to your site and go to Users » Add New

2. Enter a username in the Username field. For All in One SEO support, you can use aioseo or allinoneseo so you can recognize this user is for us.

3. Enter an email address in the Email field. For All in One SEO support, you can use support@aioseo.com.

4. In the Role drop down, select Administrator.

5. You’ll notice that WordPress has generated a strong password. Copy this password to a text file so you can send it to us.

6. Click the Add New User button to create the user.

The completed form should look like this:

You can now send us the Username and Password of the temporary login using the secure form here.