Is Alt Text Important for SEO and What Are the Best Practices

Alt text is a crucial element of accessibility and SEO. It's a description of an image that search engines can read and understand, and it's essential for users who rely on screen readers.

In fact, Google's algorithm takes alt text into account when ranking images in search results. This means that if you don't have alt text for your images, you're missing out on a key opportunity to improve your search engine rankings.

Alt text should be concise and accurately describe the image. According to Google, the ideal alt text should be around 125-150 characters.

Alt text is a crucial element for SEO, and it's not just about accessibility. Google extracts information about the subject matter of the image from the content of the page, including captions and image titles.

Using descriptive filenames is also important, as they can give Google light clues about the image subject matter. A filename like "my-new-black-kitten.jpg" is better than a generic "IMG00023.JPG".

The most important attribute for providing metadata for an image is the alt text, which also improves accessibility for people who can't see images. Alt text is used along with computer vision algorithms and the contents of the page to understand the subject matter of the image.

Optimized alt text can increase your website's visibility in search results, driving more traffic to your site. By surfacing images in search results, you can attract thousands of additional visitors.

Writing useful and information-rich alt text that uses keywords appropriately is key. Avoid filling alt attributes with keywords, as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam.

A well-written alt text can be a win-win for both accessibility and SEO.

Writing alt text is a crucial step in ensuring your website is accessible, user-friendly, and search engine optimized. To get it right, you need to follow some best practices.

Start by keeping your alt text short and sweet, usually 1-2 sentences at most. Don't overthink it – just focus on the key elements that make the image important to the page. For example, if you're using an image of a person typing on a computer, your alt text could be "Woman optimizing WordPress website for SEO" or "Woman researching free blogging platforms", depending on the topic of the webpage.

Avoid starting your alt text with "picture of" or "image of" – it's not necessary and can make your alt text seem redundant. Instead, jump right into the description of the image. For instance, if you're using a logo, illustration, or painting, be sure to mention it in the alt text.

Here are some key elements to keep in mind when writing alt text:

By following these best practices, you can ensure your alt text is both descriptive and concise, making it a valuable tool for search engines and users alike.

A descriptive text alternative to auditory and visual content ensures everyone can benefit from the content you share, especially those with visual impairments who may use screen readers to absorb the content on a webpage. An image without a description isn’t helpful for someone using that technology and creates a poor user experience and, in some cases, poor brand perception.

Alt text should be a text equivalent to the image, allowing a user with a screen reader or other assistive technology to understand the purpose of the image without seeing it. For example, if a web page contains an image of an upward arrow that links to a table of contents, the text equivalent might be "Go to table of contents."

The alt text should be in context of the content of the page and use keywords appropriately, just like in regular content. Avoid filling alt attributes with keywords, also known as keyword stuffing, as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam.

By providing alt text, you're not only improving accessibility, but also enhancing the overall user experience for all visitors. A user with a low bandwidth connection can still understand the content of an image through its alt text if the image fails to load.

Optimizing alt text is a crucial step in boosting your website's visibility in search results. By surfacing images in search results, you can attract thousands of additional visitors.

Writing optimized alt text can significantly increase your website's visibility in search results, driving more traffic to your site. This is because search engines like Google can understand the content of images with well-written alt text, making them more likely to appear in image search results.

Using alt text can also help you reach users with low bandwidth connections, who can still understand the content of an image through its alt text if the image fails to load.

Use filenames that are short, but descriptive, like my-new-black-kitten.jpg. Avoid using generic filenames like image1.jpg.

Having thousands of images on your site can be overwhelming, but you can consider automating the naming of the images.

If you localize your images, remember to also translate the filenames, keeping in mind the URL encoding guidelines if you're using non-latin or special characters.

For example, a descriptive filename is much better than a generic one like IMG00023.JPG.

Structured data is a game-changer for SEO. It allows Google to display your images in rich results, which can drive targeted traffic to your site.

Including structured data can make your images stand out in Google Images with a prominent badge. This badge gives users relevant information about your page and can drive better targeted traffic to your site.

To be eligible for a badge and rich result in Google Images, you need to follow the general structured data guidelines as well as any guidelines specific to your structured data type.

The image attribute is a required field for structured data types to be eligible for a badge and rich result in Google Images.

Optimized alt text can significantly increase your website's visibility in search results, driving more traffic to your site. This is especially true for e-commerce sites like those using WooCommerce and Shopify.

Image alt tags assessment is a crucial check to ensure all images on product pages have relevant alt tags. This is because all images used on product pages should be relevant images of the product. Images that need to have a description.

For instance, if you're using WooCommerce, you can follow the steps for adding alt and title attributes in WordPress. This includes checking if all images on the page have alt tags.

In fact, Yoast SEO for WordPress, WooCommerce SEO, and Yoast SEO for Shopify all offer an assessment that focuses on the images on your page. This includes an image alt tags assessment that checks if all images on the page have alt tags.

Here are the benefits of a proper image alt tags assessment:

When creating alt text for a webpage about education software for business school teachers, it's essential to be specific and descriptive. The line of alt text above is almost as descriptive as the good alt text from the previous example, so it doesn't suffice for this webpage.

This example dives even deeper into the topic of business school, specifying that the ideal audience is teachers. Therefore, the image's alt text needs to reflect that. A good alt text for this webpage would be: "Education software for business school teachers, providing tools for lesson planning and student engagement."

The key takeaway is that the alt text should be specific and descriptive, taking into account the target audience and the topic of the webpage. This will help search engines understand the content and context of the image.

If you're using WordPress or Shopify, you'll want to know how to add alt text to your images. In WordPress, clicking on an image will automatically open the Block tab in the sidebar, where you can add the alt text in the empty field under the "Image Settings" section.

For Shopify users, the process is slightly different. If Yoast SEO is open, you'll need to click on 'Edit with Shopify' before clicking on the image to which you want to add alt attributes.

In both cases, the most important rule of alt text is to be descriptive and specific. This means avoiding generic descriptions like "image of a cat" and instead using something like "a grey and white cat sitting on a windowsill".

Here's a quick rundown of the steps for adding alt text in WordPress and Shopify:

Remember, the goal of alt text is to provide context for search engines and users who can't see the image. By following these simple steps, you can improve your website's accessibility and SEO.

While alt text is crucial for SEO, there are some limitations and considerations to keep in mind.

Search engines can only read alt text up to a certain length, which is around 125 characters. This means that longer descriptions may not be fully crawled.

Alt text is not a direct ranking factor, but it can still have an indirect impact on SEO by improving the user experience and increasing dwell time on a page.

Using alt text for decorative images is not necessary, as search engines can ignore them.

Alt text should be descriptive and concise, but it's also important to avoid keyword stuffing.

If you're looking to optimize your images for SEO, you'll want to explore other related techniques and tools beyond alt text.

Using descriptive file names for your images can improve their visibility in search engine results. This is because search engines can't see what's inside an image, but they can read the file name.

Image compression tools like TinyPNG and ShortPixel can help reduce the file size of your images without sacrificing quality. This is especially useful for responsive images that need to load quickly on mobile devices.

Google's PageSpeed Insights tool can help you identify and optimize images on your website for better load times. It's a free resource that's worth checking out.

Using schema markup on your images can provide additional context to search engines and improve their visibility in search results. This is especially useful for e-commerce sites with product images.