Your Guide to Image SEO and Alt Text

SEO plays a very big role when it comes to making your website rank better on search engines. But apart from performing a deep keyword research, using them in your content including meta description, titles and more it is necessary for you to optimise your image as well. If you are using a Magento website, you can use extensions like SEO Images Alt Text to automatically generate alt text for images. When you think about optimizing images you might think about optimising alt text. But, there is so much more to optimising the images than just optimizing alt text. 

Image optimization is considered a major part of SEO. But it is mostly the more overlooked part of SEO. The problem is when people talk about SEO, the only part that is covered is basics and mostly image alt tag optimisation is overlooked. Certainly, using good images in your post can encourage people to read your posts more. But, you must always remember to add good image alt attributes to your images. The reason is, alt text on the images can help in strengthening the message of the pages with the help of search engine crawlers and it also helps in improving the accessibility of your website. 

Why Are Alt Tags Important? 

There are many reasons why you would want to include an alt text to your images. Below mentioned are a few reasons why adding alt image attributes are useful for your website. 

Accessibility

Alt texts are crucial for an accessible website design. The major purpose of alt text is to describe the images to the website visitors who are unable to view the images. There are screen readers and browsers that can block the images and it also includes the users who are visually-impaired or are unable to identify the images. Including alt text can help all your users to appreciate what you have shared on your website. 

Image SEO

The use of alt text on your images can help in improving the user experience. It can help you get incredible SEO benefits. Along with a well implemented image title and good file naming practices, adding alt texts can also help in contributing to image SEO. Though, the search engine drawing has improved with time. But, search engines can still not see the images on the websites as humans can. Therefore, adding appropriate image alt texts is crucial so there is no scope of getting things wrong. Leaving everything solely on search engines can cause you to miss out on ranking altogether or it can also make you rank for unintended keywords. Thus, by adding an image alt text you get an opportunity to include your target keyword. 

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How to Write a Good Image Alt Text? 

There are some tips for writing a good image alt text. These tips when kept in mind can help you in improving the SEO of your website. 

Describe Images as Thoroughly as Possible 

Alt text is created to provide explanations to what the images are all about. It is specially for the users who are unable to see the images. You should keep in mind that if your image doesn’t add any value to your content and it is just present for design purposes, it should be within CSS and not HTML. 

Keep Alt Text Short

You need to keep your alt text short. Mostly, screen readers cut off the alt text at somewhere around 125 characters. Therefore, it is recommended to keep the character count lesser. 

Use Your Keywords

Adding alt text to images gives you another opportunity to use the keywords on the page. You can use the target keywords for your alt text and help the search engines to be relevant to any search query. Though,  you must focus on describing and providing context to the images, you can use your target keywords in the alt text for at least one image on the page. 

Avoid Stuffing Keywords

You need to make sure that your alt text makes sense. Search engines won’t reward you for a poorly written alt text. Also, you must be careful while adding keywords to your alt text. Adding keywords doesn’t mean you can stuff as many relevant keywords as you can. What you need to do is to describe your images with relevant text and then add the keyword to the same if it fits. 

Try Not to Use Image as Text 

This is a general SEO-friendly tip. As search engines cannot read the text within the images that you are using, you should avoid using images in place of the words. But if it is absolutely necessary to do so, make sure that you are explaining what your image is saying within the alt text. 

Making sure that you are doing everything and using the best SEO practices can reward you with better search engine rankings. If you are unsure about using the right alt text for your images, you can simply install a SEO Images Alt Text Magento 2 extension to get a better understanding and for automatically generated alt text for the images being used on the pages. 

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