Why Image alt Text is Important for SEO

Digital marketing is advanced marketing for selling your products online. One of the important things in digital marketing is SEO. SEO means Search Engine Optimization. After the covid-19, most business owners realized that how SEO is important for their online eCommerce business. However, most marketers are advising that having a good SEO can be helpful to grow your business faster. Image is the best way to interact with your customer with your product and allow your customer to imagine how innovative your business is. That’s why today we are going to see Why image alt text is important for SEO. Before moving forward first we need to understand what is ALT Text, and why we are using ALT Text. So let’s understand that first.

What is Alt Text?

ALT Text simply means alternative text. In other words, alt text represents the alternative text or description of an image. Coming back to basics alt attribute is written in the HTML code of the web page which displays the data regarding the image appearance and image function. This HTML alt tag is important to let users and search engines know about the image and what the image represents.

Why image alt text is important for SEO?

We have already discussed earlier that SEO is important and so alt text is important too for SEO. There are many different search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. All search engines have advanced algorithms to identify what a particular webpage describes. Defining alt tags helps them to identify that page. While you are working with SEO, keywords are the most important factor. Certainly, using keywords in the image alt text, makes the web page more relevant.

This alt text can also help when your image can't load on your webpage due to a bad server or network issue. Therefore it is important to add the alt text relevant to the image. So that users can see what that image represents. Moreover, this alt text is also useful for visually impaired people to access the webpage. The screen readers can read out this text loudly.

The search engine cannot see your webpage image that's why it is important to add keywords in the alt text. However, they can read text so that can understand what the image displayed by reading the text. Otherwise, the search engine would not be able to identify the image. This will also affect the web page ranking and prevents image ranking too. But it doesn't mean that you should use a lot of keywords.

Google's algorithm is different and works smart so it will guide you when and where to sure more relevant keywords for better ranking. However, you can also rank your image with a few keywords by using good grammar and syntax. This will work for search engines and users to understand your image and what it represents.

How to add alt text?

There are some common rules while adding alt text to the image of your webpage. Basically, the main purpose of the alt tag was to help blind or visually impaired people to understand what is happening in that image. So, you should make a priority of what is happening in the image instead of the targeted keyword. But you can add one or two keywords with short and descriptive alt text. However, adding alt text in your image is most important.

Here are a few examples of how to write alt text.

Bad - Missing alt text - <img src="abc.png",alt=""/>

Good - Adding alt text - <img src="abc.png",alt="abc abc"/>

Let's take an example of bird flying image.

Bad - Add too many keywords - <img src="birdflying.png",alt=" flying bird in sky bird is flying gray and white bird is flying in the sky flying bird"/>

Best - short description with keyword - <img src="birdflying.png",alt="white and gray bird flying on the top"/>

At the End

While uploading an image or adding an image make sure to add alt text to help the user and search engine. If a search engine cannot see that image doesn't mean it doesn't count. The image also affects the SEO ranking of the website. And including an alt text can be more affecting for search engines and users too.  Putting the relevant keyword and short description to the alt tag can make an image worthwhile.

Thank you :-)