Do Not Link Your Images | Blogging Best Practices

This is the start of a quick series on the best practices for blogging. There are hundreds of things to keep in mind when maintaining a photo blog , so I’ll keep them all short and useful; and I’ll try my best to continue this series at least once a week.

I wanted to start off with a common mistake bloggers make when inserting images into their blog entries, as it comes default in WordPress. Often time, beginner bloggers link to their images. What am I talking about? Let’s first start with the code.

The code for a typical image looks like this:

<img src=”some image location”/>

By default, WordPress will link the image to itself and include something like this:

<a href=”some image location”><img src=”some image location”/></a>

What’s the problem?

Ok, so you don’t know html, how does this apply to you?  Well if your image is linked to itself, when users click on it, they are taken off of the content page and over to a webpage with just the image on it. From there, users can get confused and leave.  At the very least, they have to click the “back” button on their browser to get back to your content.  Whether your write for SLR Lounge or just your own photography blog for your business, you don’t want people exiting your site and going away from your core content. Below is an example of an image linking to itself:

How to Avoid

In WordPress you can avoid this in two ways. The first way is setting it to “link to none” upon image insertion as shown below.

The second way is to simply delete the <a href=”some location”> as well as the closing </a> that sandwiches the <img src=””/> code.

That’s it!  Told you I’d keep it short and sweet.