A Guide to Alt Text for Images

What Are Alt Tags?

Images are an important part of a website. Apart from keeping the readers hooked to the site, images make it easier for them to read and understand the content better. If you have a good alt attribute to the images, the site accessibility improves. Furthermore, it improves the site’s SEO for web search, as well as image search.

An alt tag or text that is also called alt attribute or alternative text is a text that describes an image appropriately. You might be putting enough effort and yet be missing out on another source of traffic, the images of the website. Image alt text will help in getting that traffic.

The image alt isn’t shown when a user views the page on the browser, but it will become visible when the image can’t be loaded. It is mainly for the search engine crawlers to read and describe it to the users who cannot see it.

So, if you are developing content that requires visuals, consider how the audiences would like to get their answers to the questions they have for the topic. Google search crawlers don’t want classic hyperlinked search results but the image itself that is embedded inside the webpage. Alt text can turn your images into hyperlinked search results. This is how the website receives organic traffic.

In a majority of content management systems, clicking on the image’s body in a blog post leads to image optimization or a rich text module. This is where you can change or create the alt text for an image. The alt tag gets written into the HTML source of the webpage where you will be able to edit the alt text of the image. While creating the alt text for the image, be specific and descriptive.

Alt Text is a crucial element that needs to be configured when you do SEO for the images as it helps the search engine crawlers to learn about the image's subject matter. Not only is it relevant, but it also uses image processing algorithms for finding out about the image. However, image text, when used in the right manner will provide a big hint.

Tips to Write a Good Alt Text

Importance of Alt Text

You might be thinking what is the big deal about image text? It is necessary to add them to the images of the blog post, here’s why.

  • Improves Accessibility: Several people are visually-impaired and use screen readers for checking online content. This functions by changing the on-screen content that includes audio and images. Images that don’t contain alt text might cause problems for the screen readers as they won’t be able to communicate the image content to the user. So, they will skip over the images or read unhelpful image names.
  • Enhances Topical Relevance: Google checks the word on the page for understanding what it is actually about. For instance, in case the page mentions poodles, retrievers, labradors, it will know that the page is about various dog breeds. Sure, Google can understand that the images are of dogs without even alt tags, but it might not be able to distinguish between different breeds. This is where the alt texts prove to be helpful.
  • Helps with Google Image Ranking: Google Images, the second largest search engine is responsible for 20.45% of the online searches. It means there is an opportunity to attract traffic from the Google images for your business.

Use Alt Text Properly

Alt-text is for explaining the images to the users who are not able to see them. So, describe them as specifically as you can. In case an image doesn’t cover any meaning and is only for design purposes, it should be within CSS and not HTML.

Use Keywords

Alt text allows you to include the target keywords on the page. Hence, it signals the search engines that the website page is relevant to the search query. However, your primary aim should be to provide context and describe the images. If it makes sense, then include the keyword in the alt text of at least one of the images.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Google cut your SEO points for an image text that has been written poorly. However, you are going to be in trouble if you stuff too many keywords into the image tag. Try to write descriptive alt text providing content to the images and if they can include target keywords.

Keep it Short and Relevant

Even the most popular screen readers tend to cut off the alt tags at about 125 characters. Thus, it is better to keep that character count or even less.

Avoid Using Images as Text

This is more of an SEO-friendly web development principle. Since the search engines cannot read the text within the images, you need to avoid using images instead of words.

Alt-text is a crucial element of image SEO. Almost all contents require images. For instance, if you write about photography, images on photographic examples will give crucial insight into the reading experience of the visitors. By using this, you not only make it easier for the readers to access the content but also improve the search engine ranking for your site.