The Inside Out Of Image Alt Text

One often overlooked aspect of SEO that can significantly boost your search engine rankings is Image Alt Text. This is a cost-effective tactic that not only enhances visibility but also drives targeted traffic, leads, and ultimately boosts sales. Effective image optimization for SEO can be challenging due to the dynamic nature of images, but leveraging it can provide substantial benefits to your brand. 

Let’s dive deeper into what it is and why it is important for your organic search ranking efforts.  

What is Img Alt Text?

It’s essentially the process of rendering an identity to an image on your website. Also known as alternative text, it is a brief description added to an image, serving as a textual representation. It serves multiple purposes:

• It displays when images fail to load, offering context to users.
• It enables visually impaired users to understand the content through screen readers.
• It helps search engines understand and index the image content, improving SEO.

The importance of Img Alt Text

Knowing that optimising images for SEO is important is one thing. How important is another. Understanding the significance of image alt text will help you write descriptions more effectively. Let’s look at the two major reasons. 

Web Accessibility

This text is primarily crucial for web accessibility, as it enables visually impaired users to understand the content through programs called screen readers. The W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines recommend providing text alternatives for auditory and visual content to ensure inclusivity. This requirement becomes very apparent in the context of the rising lawsuits related to website accessibility issues. 

SEO benefits

Alt text helps the search engine understand and index the image content, contributing to better search rankings. The ability of Google to understand images has significantly improved over time. According to Google, they utilise computer vision technology along with alt text and the contextual content of the page to comprehend images.

But how far will this impact the search results? Well, to begin with, about 20% of Google’s SERPs feature images and images with optimised alternative text have a 10% higher click through rates compared to those without it. Google tends to feature images for queries where visual representation is beneficial.  With 27% of the global online population using voice search on mobile devices, image optimization for SEO can provide an advantage. Microsoft’s Bing search engine also leverages image captioning to enhance search results.

What languages can Image Alt Texts be used in?

Image Alt texts can be written in any language supported by HTML and the website’s coding framework. This includes but is not limited to English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese. 

How to add Alt text to images

Adding Alt Text for SEO to images involves entering a description into the HTML code of your webpage. However, nowadays, most content management systems also have the option to add and edit image alt texts. 

For HTML

1. Locate the ‘<img>’ tag in your HTML code where you want to add the alt text. 
2. Inside the ‘<img>’ tag add the ‘alt’ attribute followed by a descriptive text.

For the WordPress CMS 

1. Upload image in the media library.
2. Click on the image to edit its details.
3. Type your descriptive alt text in the “Alt Text” field.

For E-commerce Platforms like Shopify

1. Navigate to the product or collection where the image is located.
2. Click on the image you want to edit.
3. Find the field for “Alt Text” or “Image Alt Text.”
4. Enter the descriptive text and save changes.

Adding alt texts to different types of images 

Even with the most descriptive images, words are often necessary to convey their full meaning. This is especially true for images like charts or directions. For instance, if a web page includes a downward arrow leading to a social media section, it should definitely be optimised. How should you do this? Let’s explore.

Decorative

Decorative images are purely for aesthetic purposes and do not add informational content. In such cases, the alt text can be left empty or omitted to avoid redundancy or from being visible for the wrong searches.

In such cases the alt text would look something like this:

 <img src=”background-pattern.jpg” alt=””>

Functional Images

Functional images, like buttons or icons, should have alt text that describes their function. Following the previous example on the website downward arrow, the alt text for SEO could be:

<img src=”downward arrow-icon.png” alt=”Go to social media section”>

Informational Images

Informational images, such as graphs, charts, product images or tool snapshots like dashboards should have alt text that summarizes the key information they present.

Here’s an example of image alt text for an informational image showing a snapshot of a software’s dashboard:

<img src=”software-dashboard.png” alt=”Snapshot of project management software dashboard showing a task list, Gantt chart, team collaboration panel, and calendar view.”>

Best practices for writing Alt text

Image Alt Texts are complex content sorters. They define the type of image so that the search engine can present the right type of results on the SERPs. To better understand the difference between what makes a good and a bad alt text and avoid common mistakes, let’s dive into the best practices for writing Alt text.  

1. Tailor alt text to context and audience

While click throughs can be increased through Image Alt Texts, brand awareness is the easiest KPIs to achieve. Image Alt Text for SEO offers you a chance to introduce your product/service to a new audience as much as other SEO initiatives. The key to success is understanding the audience and what interests them. 

For a blog post announcing the release of a project management software’s new timeline view feature. 

Bad Alt Text

<img src=”timeline-feature.png” alt=”Project management software”>

Good Alt Text

<img src=”timeline-feature.png” alt=”New timeline view feature in project management software, displaying project milestones, deadlines, and task dependencies for enhanced planning and coordination”>

2. Be descriptive but concise.

It’s worth mentioning that being concise with Image Alt Text description can have a significant impact on SEO. Audiences are constantly searching for things on these platforms. They are more likely to spend time on a page that provides them with relevant solutions. If you can create accurately descriptive and concise alt texts, you’ll attract the right audience and generate better rankings as well.  

3. Avoid redundancy (e.g., “image of”)

The way image identification works is that Google and screen readers for that matter will identify it from the article’s HTML source code. So in practice, you can avoid the use of the phrase “image of” at the beginning to avoid redundancy. 

4. Include keywords naturally

Incorporate keywords into the alt text without compromising the user experience. Avoid overstuffing keywords into the description. This ensures all users, including those relying on screen readers, can understand the image’s purpose and context.

This brings us to the next question: 

What is the character limit for adding alternative texts to images?

The recommended length for alt text is 125 characters, as screen reader tools often truncate text beyond this point, which can disrupt the experience for users with impairments. Ideally, the description should be concise yet comprehensive enough to convey accurate and relevant information. 

To ensure that your alternative text is aligning with the image correctly, you can check it through the CloudVision API and see if Google is understanding the image content correctly. 

But there are too many images to tag…

Adding image alt text can be a daunting task due to the time and effort required, but AI and machine learning are transforming this process. These technologies can automatically analyse images and generate descriptive alt text, enhancing both efficiency and accuracy. Tools like CoPilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini have proven to be excellent starting points for writing alt text.

Many content management systems (CMS) are now integrating AI tools to automate alt text generation, simplifying the task for content creators and ensuring websites remain accessible and SEO-friendly. For instance, the AltText.AI plugin seamlessly integrates with WordPress, automatically generating alt text for every image added to the media library.

The goal of Image Alt Text is to make your website accessible while simultaneously creating a positive impact on the search rankings. Though this may be time-consuming, it’s worth it to add alternative texts for images for which assessing your existing content is a great place to start. Add alt text to previously untagged images, and analyse the page performance to gain insights into their effectiveness. Use this data to refine alt texts for future images, optimising them for both accessibility and search engine recognition.

Ultimately, a well-optimised website that is accessible to diverse audiences not only meets legal and ethical standards but also increases visibility in search results, expanding its reach to a broader user base.