All About Alt Text and Image SEO Optimization

Whether you are a blogger or write articles, you would always be in the dilemma of adding images to your content. Don’t give a second thought to adding images; it is always good to add images. Pictures make your article look alive and happening. And also help to contribute to your website’s SEO.

This blog will tell you what alt text is and how it is essential for your SEO and how to optimize alt text and image SEO. Further, the blog will show you to write a good and effective alt text.

Alt text

Alt text refers to an alternative text that is equivalent to an image, regardless of where the reader resides.

Different names for Alt text-

• Alt tags
• Alt descriptions
• Alt attribute

Ways to present the Alternative text:

• The alt attribute of the img element
• In the image’s context or surroundings

Why Is Alt Text Important For SEO?

Make a practice of writing alt text for your images as alt text can bring a variety of benefits for your image SEO.

1. It enables approachability

Adding alternative texts makes your content accessible. As there are millions of visual people, and many use screen readers to go through the content. Alt text will facilitate communication between the image and the user by breaking the bridge of silence or miscommunication.

• It improves tropical relevance.

Alt text enables users to create a clear picture in their minds about what the blog or article is about. Alternative tags help highlight the relevance of the content by making it easy for users to understand it.

• It helps you to rank in google images.

Google images are the world’s second-largest search engine. That means there is an opportunity to drive traffic from Google images. Alt text helps in better optimization of google images. And gives you a fair chance to rank in google images.

• It serves as an anchor:
  Alt Text helps link one page to another; thus, it serves as an anchor that facilitates users in understanding the following page/link we would be stepping on.

How To Write A Good Alt Text?

Writing alternative texts is not at all challenging. It gets better with learning and practice. Following are the things to keep in mind while writing an alt text.

1. Being Accurate is a lot crucial for writing alt text. Focus on describing the image and be equivalent on content.
2. Avoid Keyword stuffing; Alt text is a shoehorn for keywords. Thus be wise while writing the content for images.
3. Be Concise; Lengthy image text is not at all entertained. It would be an act of foolishness to write long, irrelevant content for an image. Be specific and concise in your words.
4. Avoid Redundancy, don’t try to repeat the content that is already available. Repetition will only increase the length of the content but not the quality. It is advisable to write more quality content.

Optimizing The Image SEO

Once you have chosen the appropriate image for your content, the Next image is to optimize it.

• Choose the right file name.

Image SEO starts with choosing a proper name for your image. You want Google to know what an image is about without seeing the complete picture. So focus on the key phase for an image file name.

• Choose a suitable format.

The correct format doesn’t exist; it depends on the size of the image you choose. Use JPEG for more extensive illustrations, PNG for background transparency in your photo. Use SVG for logos and icons.

• Scale for image SEO

Think about the size in which you want to display your images. Keep in mind the loading times.

• Use responsive image

Images used should be responsive as it will facilitate different image widths according to the screen. This hack will optimize image SEO.

• Compress image to ensure faster run time

You must use scaled images after compressing them to ensure not making your website slow!

• Add Alt text, title text.

It is essential to add alt text and title text to improve the image and content effectiveness for image SEO.

• Add structured image data:

According to Google, structured data not only helps you rank better; but it also helps achieve a more fleshed-out listing in Image search.

Search engine algorithms are changing every day, but incorporating the right SEO strategies can make a huge difference in terms of search volumes. And Alt texts are one of such factors, and over time, image SEO surely plays a crucial role in driving traffic to your websites. These two elements contribute to a good user experience and SEO. It would be inappropriate to ignore them. Hope this reading was helpful to you and, if used effectively, can give you the desired results.