Adding images to blogs, articles, and guest posts encourage web users to read them. But it’s only well-chosen images with a good back up message, that have a good ranking in image search results.
More importantly, one should add images with good alt attributes. They are known to strengthen the message given in your articles and significantly improve the accessibility of your website.
Here I’ll explain all about image alt attributes and the need to optimize them.
What Are Alt tags?
The image alt attributes commonly called alt tags or alt text. But technically, they’re not tags, but attributes. The alt text is a basic description of the image and the function of the image on a particular page. So if you’ve posted an image to ask web users to buy product X, the alt text will be a compelling message to make them buy product X.
The alt tag is used by screen readers, to check whether the content on the image complies with the alt tag of the image. In case, the image title contains an extra call-to-action, it will not help you.
Each image from a worthy business will have an alt text. It’s not solely for SEO purposes, but also to help some of the visually impaired people to know what the image is about. Even if it doesn’t make sense to add it, you have to add it.
When the information conveyed by the alt attribute is relevant, it will significantly enhance the website’s ranking. Even though they are not visible on the page, they’re a good tool to improve SEO and user experience.
Importance of Alt tags
The keyword in image alt attributes gives ideas of the images. An alt text with the focus keyphrase provides screen readers and search engines with a textual description of the image. Now I ‘ll explain how it affects different parameters.
Accessibility improves
Millions of visually-impaired people consume online content. So it a good way of converting on-screen content, like images, into contextual form.
Images without alt text pose a problem for the screen readers. Because then they don’t have any way to communicate the content of the image to the user. If there’s nothing, they skip the images, without having an idea of what’s in the image. In this way, you just miss a potential lead.
Image SEO
Image Alt text makes the user experience better. There are both explicit and implicit SEO benefits of following these best practices that largely contributes to image SEO.
The search engine image recognition technology helps search crawlers to see the alt text of the images posted on a website page. If they are unable to understand the alt text of the image, you may miss out on ranking altogether.
Google Images
It is an opportunity to add up in Google Images, the world’s second-largest search engine ahead of YouTube, and other search engines. One can easily drive traffic by adding appropriate alt txt in the Google Images.
Just look at the number of clicks on specific Google Images in the past three months and the one which has got maximum traffic select it. Optimizing Google Images can really help your website in the long run.
Keyword
Alt text is just another opportunity to target keyword on a page and rank for the specific query in the search engines. Prioritize describing the context of the image, using keyword in the alt text of various images on the page. Keep character count of alt text around 125 characters, or less.
Alt text is just for providing text explanations to users who won’t be able to see them due to many reasons. If an image is truly not adding any value and is just for design purposes, add a keyword or keyword phrase you’re targeting to the alt text to get it ranked.
However, Google won’t help in ranking if it’s a poorly written alt text. Take alt text as an opportunity to add relevant keywords of the business into it. Focus on writing descriptive alt text so that even by reading it, web users can understand the context of the image. If possible, include the target keyword, and see how your image ranking improves.
Search engines can’t read text within your images, so it’s only through alt text you can explain it.
Summary
Even if there are different ways to optimize an image, alt text leaves a significant impact. Taking take of the tiny details, WebMechanix truly benefits from the image SEO. There are several other ways to improve the usability and conversion of the image.