The new year has officially begun, and SEO is surely part of your marketing plan. An important (and often overlooked) part of SEO is images and alt text. To provide users with the best possible experience and to help search engines understand a page, alt tags need to be set. Here’s what you need to know.
WHAT IS ALT TEXT?
Alt text (also known as an alt attribute or alt tag) refers to “alternative text” for an image. It is used to describe the contents of an image on a webpage and helps search engines and users associate the image with the content of the page. This allows it to be properly indexed within search results.
WHY IS ALT TEXT IMPORTANT?
There are two main reasons why alt text is important:
For Accessibility: Alt text can provide a better user experience for visually impaired visitors. Without alt text, screen readers will attempt to give the user context by reading the file name or saying “image”. This can be a major distraction for visitors using screen-reading technology.
For SEO: Images with alt text can appear in Google Images or image packs allowing your site to receive organic visitors. Alt text is important for SEO because search engines can’t see images, they only see the back-end HTML. Alt text is used in combination with the contents of a page and computer vision algorithms to understand the subject matter of images.
Alt text communicates to search engines what the image is about, which helps provide crawlers with more context to what the webpage is about.
ALT TEXT BEST PRACTICES
To create quality alt tags, keep in mind that you are aiming to help visitors (and site crawlers) understand the image. Some best practices to follow include:
- Be as specific as possible in your description, but only share critical information about the image
- Keep things short (under 125 characters)
- Use your keywords but avoid keyword stuffing
- Don’t start the alt text with “Image of” or “Picture of”
- If an image already has a caption, alt text is unnecessary
When adding images to your site, be sure to set an alt tag. It’s important for user experience, accessibility, and image traffic. The more images you optimize, the better your SEO strategy will be for the year to come! Want to ensure your site is optimized for success? Click here to connect with one of our digital marketing experts!
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