In fact, an Intent Lab study found that 59% of respondents consider visual information more important than text. Short for “alternative text”, the image alt text attribute is used in HTML to describe an image’s content and function. The alt text of an image is alternative information that is equally helpful for human visitors and search engine crawlers. And 64% of all Google organic search traffic is from mobile devices.Image Source: StatistaA website that’s not optimized for mobile loses. We recommend checking out this tutorial on how to master styled alt text in email. Find out the top 6 rules for creating awesome ALT Text and … Alt text (short for alternative text) is a short description that explains what is going on in your image. Alt Text should contain text as pixels when that is the image, but otherwise describe the image’s function (email vs envelope for an icon) or form (a brief description that makes sense in the image… You need to be able to provide your clients with a detailed report that helps them, Mobile accounts for 51.65% of web page views worldwide. I hate spam as much as you do! So your alt text could be something like "woman using a laptop and holding credit card while shopping securely online.". It should be added to every image that conveys meaning in instructional and communications materials including Moodle sites, word processing documents, and slide presentations. Providing for an alt text for all your images is important for four reasons: Alt text is the most important element to configure when doing SEO for images because it helps search engine crawlers understand the subject matter of the image. The alt text field could say "Photo showing a yellow bike" so that the blind could have an idea of it. All you have to do is – 1. See the examples below on how to write good alt text. Keep your alt text … Here are a few examples of image alt tags: Meh Alt Text: . Be specific when you describing the image. It accurately describes an image with keywords that users might use in a search engine’s search box. This is also one of the core principles of. This description provides visitors with a complete picture of your page content. Image alt text also helps describe an image when a subscriber’s email client blocks images. However, you may have come across people using the incorrect term "alt tags" as well. Images that are links or buttons 2. But search engine bots can crawl the text content easily but the media content like images are not easy for search engines to crawl and index in the database. Alt text, short for alternative text, is a small piece of text intended to describe an image, photograph, chart or any other picture on a website. However, the image that's featured along with it is from a completely different site. There may following reasons for not displaying an image on the webpage 1. Continuing our article series on accessibility requirements, Alternative Text or Alt-Text is an area that is often misunderstood. The alt text is not shown when a page is viewed in the browser but it becomes visible when an image cannot be loaded. An accurate description is one that helps users and search engines understand what an image is about, without looking at the image. Note: If your "Alt Text" is not displaying, then the length of your "Alt Text" may be too long. However, you shouldn't use this as an opportunity to stuff your alt text with keywords. So what is alt text for images? Let’s see how to write good image alt text that will help search engines but without doing keyword stuffing. Alt text for images provides you with another opportunity to use your target keyword and inform search engines about the relevance of your page for a particular search query. If an image is not displaying on the webpage for any reason, the alternative text will display there, it provides information to the Reader that at this place there was an image related to “Alternative Text”. People have concerns that Google bot might not be able to read all images if they are not loaded from the beginning. A non-descriptive text may confuse the reader as well as search engines and our purpose to get traffic, to rank in the image searches will not fulfill. It allows you to adjust elements like alt text font color or size, or the background color to display when images are blocked. According to W3C Accessibility Guidelines, for code to be considered W3C-valid, it is important to include both image alt text and image title text in the image for important images on the page. Google bot can read the value of the alt text, even if the images are not fully loaded. Although it's not always visible to regular visitors, alt text for images helps search engine crawlers and screen reading tools to understand the appearance and function of your images. Learn why ALT text is so important for Image SEO. Alt text or alternative text is a short "hidden" description that you can add to your picture block and gallery block images. So if you fail to use alt text for images on your site, your competitors may have leverage over you and get more visibility in relevant search results. Includes a step-by-step guide on "how to write amazing ALT text" with real life image examples. If you choose to disable the Gutenberg editor, then here’s the process of adding alt text to images in Classic editor. This means that without alt text for images, search engines wouldn't be able to understand the images on your page. Don’t always use your main keywords but use semantically related keywords – Many times it’s difficult to have the main keyword in the alt text, a good alternative is to use related keywords. Alt Text Examples (The Good, The Meh & The Ugly)The optimal format for image alt text is to be as descriptive as possible and avoid keyword stuffing your alt tags. That's what's going to happen if you don't use alt text for images to optimize your on-page content. Alternative text, or “alt text” describes the content of images, graphs and charts. For images that link to their image description page (which is nearly all images on Wikipedia), the alt text cannot be blank nor should the alt parameter be absent. Repeat Text in the Image . It's a short HTML attribute that is a description of about 100 characters that you assign to the images on your web page to describe what the image is. At the same time it … Alex Chris - Digital Marketing Consultant and author. The alt text only appears in the source code of your website, as a line of HTML code also known as the alt attribute. Alt text for images is vital to successfully optimize every aspect of your page content for search engines. The alt text value is shown in the place of the image when the image cannot be loaded (in case users have low bandwidth connections), The alt text improves the accessibility of a page. Applying an alt attribute on an image helps Google understand what an image is about to serve it in image results. This could be a huge missed opportunity because images take up a prominent position in some search engine results, as you can see in the screenshot below. So it ensures that every visitor can appreciate your content regardless of their visual ability. This makes it crucial to use alt text for images and optimize every aspect of your page for higher visibility. To help understand this better, follow the guidelines below: Use images that are relevant to your content – if you add images that are not relevant to the rest of the content, you won’t be able to have alt text that is descriptive and keyword-rich. Having a good alt attribute to all your images improves the accessibility of a site and also helps SEO both for image search and web search. Be specific when you describing the image. Accessibility is one of the significant benefits of alt text for images. Alt text has a few uses: Used by screen reader technology to describe images out loud for visually impaired website visitors To display instead of the image if the image is broken or loads slowly Let’s say you are writing an article on ‘how to train your beagle dog to fetch” and you want to write an SEO optimized alt text for this image: Bad Example (not providing for an alt text): , , . This will divert much potential traffic from your site to theirs, which improves their chances of ranking higher. optimized the text with the right keywords, discover highly profitable and relevant keywords, Google Advanced Search Operators: 50+ Google Search Commands, WWW vs Non WWW: Which is Right from SEO Perspective. The alt text is an attribute added to an image’s HTML that describes what appears in the image. If an image has text in it, that text should be the alt text. Alt text is a HTML attribute that displays an alternative text when non-textual elements like images cannot be displayed on the browser. Depict the picture, and be explicit. For example, a logo for Acme Widgets that features the actual words should have alt text that includes those words. Use alt text to talk about the image. But, here’s an important point… If an image doesn’t require alt text, best practice is to add an empty alt attribute. When you add an image element to your HTML, you can specify the alt text value by adding the [ALT=” value goes here”] within the tag. So it helps you provide better web accessibility to visually-impaired users. 100 % privacy. Right-click on the image in the document and choose ‘Format Picture’ But what is its use in SEO? In addition to this, there are a few more rules that you should remember. In simple words, one major reason for using alt text is to define an image to search engine crawlers. The alt attribute provides alternative information for an image if a user for some reason cannot view it (because of slow connection, an error … Alt text is a safeguard in that it displays on the page in place of where the “broken” image is, providing users with content as a fallback. The following steps show how to add ALT text (alternative text) to images using Word 2016. Image titles and alt texts are both attributes in an image tag that describe the content of that image. WordPress allows you to add Alt text to your images when you upload them using the default media up-loader of WordPress. This is where communication in the SEO world can get dicey, because it may be known as one thing that just about everyone knows what an alt tag is, but in reality, it is entirely different. 125 characters) but descriptive. Because alt text, or alternative text, is the alternate text attribute of the image tag. A good way to ensure that your description is accurate is to write it thinking how to best describe the image to users who cannot see it. They make a page easier to read, more visually attractive and they help in presenting a topic better. Alt texts are short descriptions that help describe an image, usually on web pages. For example if you have a photo showing a bike. A way to minimize this risk is by using an alt text for all your images. However, what have you done to optimize your images? To take advantage of this for SEO purposes, make sure that your ALT text includes the SEO keywords (or closely related keywords), you want a page to rank for BUT without doing keyword stuffing. Your primary keyword is "online shopping safety" but you're also targeting keyword variations like "shopping securely online" and "safety while shopping online. Alt text or alternative text is also known as "alt descriptions" or "alt attributes." Alt text is short for alternate text. Depending on the title, this may or may not be quite as helpful as it could be. Sure, it's an image of a football game, but there's a lot more going on here. Typically, visitors will not see this text unless the images are disabled or broken. Basically the screen reader will read what is being displayed on the screen. It would be better to have the screen reader ignore it completely. There’s all sorts of … While you should aim for descriptiveness, you don't have to write a paragraph to describe the image. 2. WordPress, for instance, ask you to fill both these fields. ALT text is alternative text. 2. Instead, it is displayed when the user hovers their mouse over the image. Put simply, 'Alt Text' means 'Alternative text for images'. These are: 1. Images which contain important text 3. STEP 4: ALT-TEXT Connect with him on Twitter. Does it really affect your rankings and, if so, how? Add Image Alt Text in Classic Editor. The ALT text should simply repeat, word-for-word, the text contained within that image. 1- Alt text helps search engine crawlers to understand image descriptions, context, and function which brings an improvement to index the image properly for search results. This is because a screen reader, in order to describe the purpose of the link, will default to reading out the image filename when no alt text … The alt text appears in a blank box that would normally contain the image. While most human visitors to your website can see images, in some circumstances, the images you use on your website aren’t visible to them. Overlooking alt text can be a huge mistake as it gives your competitors more opportunity to get ahead of you in search engine results. How Do I Use Alternative Text for SEO? Alt text for galleries is entered in the “Image Title” box on Squarespace’s Edit Image popup *Note that if you don’t want this text to show as a caption in a gallery (which I wouldn’t), you’ll need to edit the gallery, click the Design tab, and disable “Show Title and Description.” Alt text helps them consider what’s in the image and how it relates to the text around it. It also helps search engine crawlers properly index your images and improves your chances of gaining visibility for those images in search engine results. It is not the only element, they also use image processing algorithms to figure out what an image is about but the alt text, if used correctly, gives them a big hint. Also called "alt tags" and "alt descriptions," alt text is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user's screen. STEP 4: ALT-TEXT. Now, whenever subscribers receive your messages and their images aren't set to display by default, they will see the "Alt Text" for that image instead! Google uses alt text in the same way that the visually impaired use them — as a way to comprehend images because the algorithm cannot see nor cognitively understand images. Alt text is also shown if the image on your page can’t be found or can’t be displayed for any reason. Here are some best practices to follow when writing alt text for images: Since the alt text for images is intended to describe the image, it needs to be as specific as possible. Going forward you can use better filenames but you don’t have to go back and change the names of your existing images. Alt text best practices: Eventually, image alt text should be distinct yet in addition descriptive of the point of the webpage. The alt text appears in a blank box that would normally contain the image. via GIPHY If the image features a product, then you can include the product name into the tag for those who can’t see the image. You can add other words, but the alt text should say the same thing as the image. Alt text (alternative text) is a word or phrase that can be inserted as an attribute in an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) document to tell Web site viewers the nature or contents of an image. Alt text best practices: Eventually, image alt text should be distinct yet in addition descriptive of the point of the webpage. What about renaming the image with the keyword. It is added to the tag in the HTML of a page. If that happens, the alt text is shown inside the image boundaries. Required fields are marked *. Search engine crawlers read the alt text value and screen readers use it to ‘describe’ the image to users who cannot see. In addition, alt text for images shows up in place of an image file that fails to load. Do you recommend going back and reloading each image with a new title? Think about like this:  if you were to close your eyes and have someone read the alt text to you, wouldn't you want it to be as accurate as possible? Keep your alt text less than 125 characters. A good monthly SEO report draws the line differentiating a good SEO consultant from a bad one. And you can't afford to miss out on these valuable opportunities if you want to get to the top of relevant search results. This can happen if they have images turned off in their email client, or are reading your campaign with a screen reader. You don't necessarily need to include a description for the other elements like the people in the background, the building, or the traffic lights. A good alt text is short (approx. I’m sure you know about alt text. Wondering how alt text on images can improve your search engine optimisation. Ideally, your alt text for images should both contain a relevant target keyword and a clear description of the image. What Is Alt Text (And Why It’s Important for SEO) You may know it as ‘alt text’, ‘alt tags’, ‘alt attributes’, or ‘alt descriptions’, but all of these terms refer to the same thing. So you're pretty much done with your on-page optimization efforts, right? If your alt text is correct then you don’t have to worry too much about the image filenames. Alex has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and Digital Marketing. It is an attribute you can (and REALLY SHOULD) apply to any image on your website. Alt Text (also known as alternative text or alt attribute) is So they need a bit of human guidance to understand those elements, properly index them, and display them in relevant search results. It's a short HTML attribute that is a description of about 100 characters that you assign to the images on your web page to describe what the image is. 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