In the world of digital marketing, optimising your website for search engines is more than just about keywords and backlinks. One often overlooked element is image alt text. While it may seem like a small detail, alt text plays a significant role in how search engines understand and rank your content. It’s not just about accessibility; it’s about enhancing your site’s visibility in search results.

In this post, we’ll dive into the reasons why image alt texts matter for SEO, shedding light on how this simple yet powerful tool can make a difference in your website’s performance.

What is Image Alt Text?

Alt texts, or alternative texts, are brief descriptions added to images on a website. They serve a dual purpose: enhancing accessibility for visually impaired users who rely on screen readers and providing search engines with context about the image content.

While images can captivate and engage visitors, search engines cannot "see" them in the way humans do. Instead, they rely on alt texts to understand the image's relevance to the surrounding content.

This makes alt texts a crucial component of any SEO strategy, ensuring that your images contribute to your site's overall search engine visibility.

Why Image Alt Text is Important

Alt text is more than just a technical requirement; it is a fundamental aspect of how your website communicates with both users and search engines. For users who rely on screen readers, alt text provides a description of the image, making your content more accessible and inclusive. But beyond accessibility, alt text is a powerful SEO tool.

When search engines crawl your site, they index the text but cannot interpret images the way humans do. Alt text bridges this gap by giving search engines the necessary context to understand what an image represents. This understanding helps in associating the image with relevant keywords, which can improve your website's search engine ranking. A well-crafted alt text can enhance the user experience, contributing to lower bounce rates and higher engagement - factors that search engines consider when ranking your site.

How to Add Alt Text and What to Write

Adding image alt text is something that happens behind the scenes of your website. In most content management systems (CMS), clicking on an image will open a box that lets you replace any image label with your own alt text - which begs the next big question…

‍What should the alt text on an image say?

Our advice is to keep it short but concise - clearly highlighting the main features of the image in line with the content on the webpage and why you chose it.

Top Tips for Writing Image Alt Text

Ready to start adding some much-needed alt texts to your website images?

Here are a few more tips from the Social Loop team to help.

• Be Descriptive Yet Concise: Clearly describe the image content in a brief sentence. Aim for a balance between detail and brevity, typically within 125 characters.
• Incorporate Relevant Keywords: Where appropriate, include a keyword that aligns with the content of the page, but avoid keyword stuffing.
• Avoid Redundancy: Do not use phrases like "image of" or "picture of" since screen readers automatically announce the presence of an image.
• Focus on the Function: If the image serves a specific function, such as a button or link, describe its purpose rather than its appearance.
• Contextual Relevance: Ensure the alt text is relevant to the content around the image, helping both users and search engines understand its role on the page.
• Maintain Accessibility: Write alt text that is meaningful for visually impaired users, ensuring they receive the same value from the image as sighted users.
• Use Proper Grammar and Spelling: Even though it’s a brief description, proper grammar and spelling are important for clarity and professionalism.
• Leave Decorative Images Blank: If an image is purely decorative and adds no informational value, leave the alt text blank or use a null value (alt="") to allow screen readers to skip it.

Finally, remember that when writing or creating anything for your website, you need to look at it through the eyes of your website visitor, user, or customer.

If the end user can understand it, then you know it makes sense. If not, then you are simply creating more blocks and obstacles in the way that they use and experience your website and content.

For more advice on how to use image alt text across your website and online content, the Social Loop team is here to help.

Our team of web designers and writers, SEO experts and graphic specialists, are well tuned in elevating every corner of a webpage to make it better - both for users and in the eyes of search engines.