SEO Strategies: Benefits of Alt Text
What is Alt Text?
You may be wondering what alt text actually is. Images have alt text for people who are visually impaired. This is essentially text that describes the image and is sometimes referred to as alt tag and alt description. While acting as a description for the visually impaired is first and foremost alt text’s primary purpose, it has since become an on page SEO strategy.
The WebCo is a local SEO agency with decades of experience. Talk to us today.
On Page SEO Strategy: Alt Text
There are many opportunities to incorporate on page SEO strategies in order to fully optimise your site to appear in search engines. Adding alt text to your images doesn’t only optimise your site, but without this action, your site can actually be punished, pushing your site even further down search results.
gle relies on the alt text to learn the context of the images when a site fails to render. Not only this. Let’s say users enter your site when it hasn’t been rendered. These users will see descriptions of the would-be images in place of them, avoiding blank spaces from appearing. The blank spaces would have encouraged users to not trust the webpage and click out, increasing the bounce rate.
It’s clear that implementing alt text is an action that doesn’t take long and pays off with its results. When you get to the stage of building pages, it’s crucial that writing alt tags become second nature in order to truly reap the benefits.
A pro SEO tip for on page SEO optimisation is to enable a protocol whereby tables are placed at the top of each site page in the document your writer is crafting the content on. This table could include the URL, meta title, meta description, alt text and H1 tag.
Utilising the tables will enable a checklist and avoid those employees who aren’t trained copywriters having to write these elements. It additionally avoids any confusion of the specific page the copywriter is referring to, and where the each page begins and ends.
Whether you’re after small business SEO or you’re wanting to maintain your current ranking, The WebCo can assist you with your SEO marketing strategy
How to Write Alt Texts
The key with writing alt text is not just to keyword stuff the description. Just like sentences in blogs, there needs to be fluidity in the alt description so you can read it like a normal sentence.
The main purpose of alt text is to speak to those who are visually impaired. Ensure you are describing the image to this audience when you are writing this text. It needs to make sense, not be too complex and likewise, not too simple.
To create an image alt text, choose one or two relevant, popular keywords that will be associated with your image. The keywords should be related to your business or service, and describe the image itself. For example, if you own a mechanic business and the image is a man opening their car hood, the image alt text could say “A man repairing a car.” Google will crawl this description and use it to judge the relevancy of your image, which will impact your web page ranking and the image ranking too. This will help increase your rank in the web search results as well as the image search results.
Remember, you must spend some time playing around with phrasing to seamlessly incorporate one or a couple keywords. Long-tail keywords will do especially well.
Alt Text Examples
- Fresh vegetarian ramen noodle soup with tofu, bok choy, cheese and shiitake mushrooms in a blue bowl
- Handsome businessman working remotely on laptop during lockdown
- Family of three eating a picnic at the beach
Need a hand in optimising your website element with your targeted keywords? Let us help you.