Over the years, search engine optimization (SEO) has become paramount in the business and digital marketing world. Part of the overall strategy is to come up with relevant and valuable pieces of content. Whether texts, videos, or images, they ought to resonate well with your target market and appeal to search engines like Google.
However, have you wondered how images are crawled and indexed for SEO ranking decisions? This where Alt Text comes into the picture. In this article, we’ll share what you need to know about Alt Text, including its uses and benefits and how to incorporate it.
Alt Text in a nutshell
It may not be conspicuous in the eyes of the average visitors to your website, yet it plays a vital role in implementing your SEO strategy and making your site accessible. In other words, it is a short description of the images within the HTML of your web page. Also known as “alt attribute” or “alt description,” it describes the photo and what it is for.
The uses and benefits of Alt Text
If you’re wondering why there’s a need to write a short description for your photos, here are its uses and benefits:
- For SEO: It’s not necessarily the photo’s high resolution, striking message, and relevancy that influence your SEO. The algorithms of search engines do crawl and index the photo description to determine the ranking. This is why having a well-drafted description makes all the difference. Without it, the photo won’t affect your ranking at all.
- For site accessibility: When users look for certain images, they still have to type in relevant text lines on the search engine field. From there, various relevant photos will appear, and once clicked, they’ll be prompted to the appropriate website. Without Alt Text, search engines won’t make your photos readily available to search results, where you’ll lose a big chunk of users who should have accessed your site.
- For technical glitches: What’s great about using Alt Text for your photos is how it allows you to identify site problems. Whether it’s an Internet connectivity issue or a loading problem, you’ll instantly know there’s a technical glitch that needs to be addressed. The chances are that the photos won’t correctly populate, and the Alt Text assigned to the images will appear. When this happens, you will then know what to do.
Top tips in using Alt Text
Now that you know its uses and benefits, let’s delve deeper into how you’ll utilize it properly. Here are several practical tips for you to follow:
- Apply it for every image: The rule of thumb is to use this for all photos posted on your website. Not only will your pictures attract users to your website, but the descriptions will appeal to the search engines as well.
- Keep it descriptive: Keep in mind that you are only allowed to have a maximum of 100 characters. For this reason, make the most of it and keep it as descriptive as possible.
- Just describe the image: In line with the previous point, you have to describe the photo as is, which means that you must not add any unnecessary fluff. The trick here is always to maintain its relevance.
- Utilize keywords: The keywords are words or phrases that users are more likely to type in when looking for images relevant to your industry. For this reason, you must ensure that you incorporate appropriate keywords in your Alt Text for your ranking.
Conclusion
At this point, you now know what Alt Text has to offer for your website’s photos. Be sure to follow the valuable tips outlined above in writing and utilizing this short image description. You’ll be surprised at how, as simple as this makes your photo prominent and relevant, this will take your SEO efforts up a notch!
We’re a digital marketing agency providing premier SEO, website development, and PPC services in Toronto and North America. If you’re looking to incorporate Alt Text into your photos for your SEO, check our new program or book your free analysis evaluation today!