Images play a very vital role and are useful resources when talking about building a website. They assist in providing additional context for page content, adding visual appeal to pages, breaking up the text, and so much more. But do you know uploading an unoptimized image can have a negative impact on your website’s SEO?

Alt text for images is very crucial to optimize every characteristic of your page content for search engines. This is because search engines like Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo drag web pages and are impotent to understand image files unless there has been an alt tag that has been set.

Hence, Alt text is very essential for search engines as it enables them to understand your page better and provide the audience with the best possible results when they are searching online. However, alt text is often forgotten or overlooked by a lot of website owners which is a huge mistake. Hence, in this blog post, we are going to discuss what is alt text and why is it so important for SEO. You will also discover some brilliant tips along the blog to write proper alt text that’ll further help you to gain more visibility in search engine results. So, read on.

What is Image Alt Text?

Alt text is also known as an alt description, alt attribute, or alt tag. It is a piece of detailed information describing the context of an image. In simpler words, alt text is a written copy that appears on the user’s screen in the place of an image if the image fails to load on a webpage. This written text helps screen-reading tools describe images better to visually impaired readers. It also helps search engines crawl better and rank your website. Alt text enables your website’s images to be accurately acknowledged by search engines when they analyze the content of your website in response to a search.

Why is Alt Text so Important for SEO?

As we have mentioned above, alt text help provide context to what an image is displaying. It also helps to inform search engine crawlers and allows them to index the image properly. However, not setting an alt text to the images of your website can have a ruinous effect on the ranking of your web pages.

Alt text helps describe what an image should be showing when the web page does not display the images properly. However, if you do not set any alt text to your images, the browsers will have no idea what an image should be displaying. This further provides a significantly poorer user experience.

Fundamentally, the main goal of alt text is to increase accessibility by explaining what an image is depicting to those who are blind or visually impaired.  However, it benefits search engine crawlers as well, which boosts SEO. If you don’t give your images alt attributes, screen readers and browsers will have a tough time interpreting your website, which will make it less enjoyable for those who are blind or visually impaired. Make sure to add informative alt text to all of your website’s photos so that both browsers and search engines can access your content.

How to Write Good Alt Text

Try avoiding writing the alt text solely for SEO purposes, as this can further change the true purpose of writing alt text. Remember that your first priority should be to describe the image descriptively as possible. Let’s take an example; if you have someone read the alt tags to you while you are closing your eyes, wouldn’t you want the text to be as precise as possible? By no means there should be keyword stuffing in your Alt tags. Try to keep your alt text short and descriptive by using only one or two keywords.

Always Make Sure the Images of Your Website Have an Alt Text!

Make it a habit that whenever you upload an image always remember to set an alt text. Adding alt text to the images of your website will make sure that your website is search engine optimized. It will not only improve the user experience but also help to search engines crawl better and rank your website. And if by any chance you haven’t set the alt text for your images then we would like to suggest that you should set other things aside and add descriptive alt text throughout your website.

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