Image Alt Text: How It Can Help Your SEO

Today, Google’s search engine delivers just as many image results for a query as it does text-based results. Have you ever noticed that when you do a Google search, the search engine pulls in a substantial number of clickable images at the beginning of the main results page?

You might be putting in a significant amount of SEO efforts and still missing out on another source of organic traffic: your website’s images. So then, how do you get this piece of the cake too? The answer is: Image alt text.

If the content you’re creating could use supporting visuals, consider how your audience might prefer to find answers to their search queries. In multiple cases, users do not want the text results. Instead, they are more inclined towards the image — embedded inside your webpage.

One of the most important favors image alt text can do for you is to turn your images into hyperlinked search results — giving your website yet another way to reach organic visitors.

What is Alt Text and how to add it to your images?

Also known as ‘alt descriptions’, this text helps screen-reading tools to describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website. Simply put, this text is the copy that appears in place of an image if the image fails to load on the screen.

In most content management systems (CMSs), when you upload an image, it opens an image optimization box where you can create and change an image’s alt text, caption, etc. The alt text you put is automatically written into the webpage’s HTML source code where you can edit it further if the need arises.

The vital rule of image alt text? Be specific and descriptive. However, it is important to note that this rule can lose its significance if the text doesn’t match the image’s context.

Best practices for image alt text

While image alt text must be specific, they should also be representative of the topic the webpage is talking about. Here are a few techniques you can use to write effective image alt text for SEO purposes:

• Specifically, describe the image: use the image’s subject and the context to guide you
• Keep the alt text under 120 characters: screen-reading tools often stop reading the text after a point, cutting-off long text at awkward moments.
• Avoid starting alt text with “image of…” or “picture of…”: the best practice is to get straight to the image’s description.
• Use keywords, but sporadically: include your article’s target keyword if it can be seamlessly included in your alt text. For example, if your article is about “how to generate leads through social media”, your image alt text can just be “lead generation”
• Avoid cramming your keyword in every single image’s alt text: if your post has multiple images, identify the ones that best describe your main keyword and assign the text to that image.

So, now where do you start with developing alt text for your blog posts and web pages? One of the ways to go about this is to perform an audit of your existing content to see where you can incorporate alt text into previously untagged images. Then compare and see how the organic traffic on the pages you give alt text to grows.

The more images you optimize, the better your SEO will perform in the long run.