What is Alt Text?
Alt Text (alternative text) – also known as “alt description” or “alt attribute” – is the text description of images on webpages. Its main purpose is to improve accessibility for people who cannot see images. It’s commonly known as “alt-tag,” but that’s technically incorrect.
The Alt Text is the attribute found inside the HTML tag on web pages. The alt attribute starts with “alt=” followed by the Alt Text within quotation marks. This is typically how it appears:
<img src=”image.jpg” alt=”Image Alt Text” title=”Image title”/> .
Why is Alt Text important?
The primary purpose of adding Alt Text to images on a web page is to improve web accessibility.
Millions of visually impaired people use screen reader software to access online content – and for them, having the text-based equivalent of visual information is essential. Without an Alt attribute, there is no way for a screen reader to interpret the content of the image, which can negatively impact the user experience. Additionally, Alt Text plays an important role in SEO.
Alt Text Importance for SEO
To understand its importance for SEO, it’s important to know that while alt attributes are not visible to users, they can be detected by search engines. Just like the screen readers, Alt Text helps search engines understand the content and context of the image.
Alt Text not only provides a clear description of an image, but it also adds semantic meaning. This improves the page’s topic relevance in Search Engines and helps it secure a higher ranking. The benefits of Alt Text for SEO also become apparent in its role in securing a higher ranking in Google Images – which can serve as an additional source of traffic for your website. Finally, the Alt Text plays an important role in website navigation and provides optimum user experience when images are used as part of the content.
When images are used as links, the Alt Text acts as anchor text for that link and helps Google understand what the linked page is about.
Alt Text best practices
Adding Alt Text to images is an effective way to improve the accessibility of your website and support your other SEO efforts. Optimizing your images and writing appropriate Alt Texts is not difficult, especially if you use a CMS like WordPress for your website.
Scan your website for missing anchor texts: You should first check for missing Alt Texts, and the best way to go about it is to use a free website analysis plugin from the WordPress plugin repository or any of the free online website analysis tools, to crawl your website and find images that are missing or have empty Alt Texts.
Once you’ve created a list of all the images missing the Alt Text, you should start writing descriptive text to contextualize them. You don’t need to worry about adding an Alt attribute to every single image on your website. Instead, focus on images that are most important to the content of your website and images on your most visited pages that already generate a lot of organic traffic.
Keyword best practices for Alt text
The Alt Text should only include relevant and descriptive keywords that add context to the Image being used. Make sure to use information-rich, valuable text that is in line with and relevant to the page’s content. Avoid keyword stuffing as it hinders the user experience and negatively impacts your website’s SEO.
Don’t use as many keywords as possible hoping it will help you rank better. This practice is strongly discouraged by search engines. It is unethical and ineffective. Keep it under 100 characters. Most often, Alt Texts consist of a single word – or maybe a phrase on a sentence with an appropriate description.
While you have more than enough “room” to optimize your Alt Text. Make sure you don’t write long-winded descriptions that might get truncated by screen reader software.
Now you’re equipped with the best knowledge for using Alt Text for images on your website.