Alt text is a usually forgotten part of SEO, but that doesn’t mean you can or should continue to keep ignoring it! Alt text is the description you give an image, this is important because it tells search engines, like Google, what your image is (because search engine bots cannot see images).
The reason why alt text is forgotten all the time is probably because you can’t usually see it on the live website. It is only displayed when there is an issue with the image itself.
According to SEO Shark the local SEO agency, even though it is only a small part of SEO, it is still necessary to fill in the alt text of your images. There are many other important components to SEO and it can take a long time to implement. If you feel you are lacking the resources to do SEO properly, you can always hire an SEO agency to help out.
Have a read on below to find out more about alt text for images and why they are important:
Helps Improve Ranking in Google Images
Google Images is a massive search engine within itself, so this is certainly something you want to be ranking for. Your alt text provides a great place to input some of your important keywords for that page. This is what users will type into Google Images to find what they are looking for.
Without including alt text, Google doesn’t really know what your image is about and it can’t join the dots, when someone searches for a keyword, to your image. So, make sure you help Google as much as you can by providing this important piece of information.
People are using and searching for images more now then ever, so if you want the chance to grab that extra little bit of traffic for your website, then you should be adding alt text to your images.
Improves Accessibility
Not only is alt text important for search engine bots to understand what the image is, but also there are a lot of people in the world who are visually impaired. By having proper alt text, these people can still understand what is on the page.
There are tools out there that convert what is on a webpage into text and reads it out for those who are visually impaired. Without providing an alt text, the person will not understand what the image is. There isn’t a way for these tools to communicate to the person what the image is without alt text.
Improves Relevance
On your website you’ve probably got some topics of expertise, that you want to remain relevant for. Well, having alt text on your images is just another way you can do this. When search engine bots crawl your site they are looking at the terms and are determining how relevant your page is.
If you are including certain terms in a lot of different places (like the meta data, heading tag, body, alt text, etc.) then it sends a pretty clear message that those are the keywords that are relevant to this page and the ones you want to rank for.
Writing Good Alt Text
It is not that difficult to write a good alt text for your images. You need to ensure that you are descriptive, but also short and sharp. Here is it a little bit of a balancing act, and you may find that you need to compromise one or the other.
In your alt text you shouldn’t be keyword stuffing, this isn’t best practice in SEO. All you need is a couple of words explaining the picture. Think about it this way, if you just read your description, would you get a clear enough idea of what the image is?
