
It’s not enough to choose beautiful, high-definition photos to go with your home page or blog posts. Adding alt texts to your images can tick the boxes for both your usability and search engine optimisation efforts.
An alt text or alt tags is a written descriptive text about an image that informs and aids the users in case said image fails to load on a webpage. It also helps screen-readers to read back the text for people with visual impairment. For digital marketers, it is recommended to supply images with alt texts so that the search engine spiders can crawl it and help it rank in the SERPs.
SEO-wise, alt text is important because it is part of the many ranking signals of Google’s proprietary search algorithm. Crawlers run through an image’s alt text to know more about the image and the web page’s subject matter. Well-written alt texts on images help Google more about what the page is about, which makes it more decisive to show your page up to users with intent close to what your brand means or offers.
There are searches where answers should be in the form of images rather than text. For example, if a user wants to create an account in an app, he’d be happier to see screenshots of the process instead of reading through a detailed step-by-step procedure in text.
If you do image optimisation well, your page can receive a much-needed boost as Google Images can bump your image on top of the results pages instead of the usual hyperlinked results. Image packs, or special results that appear as a horizontal row of image links, are a great way to earn organic traffic.
For User Experience, adding an alt text makes your content more accessible to people with disabilities. In 1999, W3C included in its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 the guideline to “provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content.” This means that web pages that contain images, videos, or sounds must have equivalent information (alt text, transcripts, subtitles, etc.) to its auditory or visual content.
In terms of navigation, when a web page has an image of either a downward or upward arrow, a text equivalent might read “Go up on top of the page” or “Go down to the bottom of the page.” If a visually impaired user visits the website, a screen reader or any piece of assistive technology can help give auditory feedback to him, provided the textual information is present.
If you’re using a content management system (CMS), there’s likely an option to write the photo’s alt text in its rich text module. In most cases, while you’re in edit mode, you can change the alt text of an image by clicking the image itself.
When you write your alt text, there are two principles to live by: descriptiveness and specificity. Remember that when writing alt text, it pays to consider the image’s context.
Need more tips to make your image optimisation yield better results for your overall SEO campaign?
It’s never too late to develop good alt texts for your images, whether they’re published on a landing page or a blog post. You can start by doing an audit of all images on your website and see which ones do not have an alt text or those with poorly written alt texts. Monitor and see how your organic traffic increase for those pages you optimised the images for.
SEO Premier is a full-service digital agency that offers a wide range of online marketing solutions, including image optimisation. Outsource your digital marketing needs today!
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