Considering how long the image ALT tag has been around, it always surprises me how often it is neglected by web designers. If you want a Jan rant, ask me about web designers who then go on to offer SEO services but can’t get the basic onpage SEO elements in place…
Needless to say, the topic of image ALT tags has come up several times this week, so I thought a blog post would be useful.
Basic OnPage SEO
As a brief overview, onpage SEO is telling the search engines what your website is about. It includes ensuring your website code contains your keyword focus in elements such as:
- Title tags
- Image ALT tags
- Heading tags
- Web copy
The aim is to be both people and search friendly.
What is an image ALT tag?
Search engines cannot read images, use the image ALT tag to describe what your pictures are about
Image ALT tags have been around for a long time. Their purpose is to describe the image and they are used by screen readers to provide a text equivalent to the graphical element.
ALT descriptions are also shown when an image does not load in regular browsers.
It is standard good practice to include an image ALT description for graphical elements on a page. This has been the case for years, so no excuses!
Where does onpage SEO come into play?
Search engines cannot read images. They’re getting better at face recognition, but rely on you to tell them what your image is about in context with your web page.
Who better to explain more than Mr Google himself, Matt Cutts.
As you can see, image ALT tags and other onpage SEO elements are a part of building your website. You need to give your web designer a clear idea of what each page is about so that they can do their job.
If you are building the website yourself, rename images so the file name is relevant and include the ALT tag on every image.
It’s much easier to do onpage SEO as you build your site than to go back and start adjusting once your website is live.
Over to you, do you use the ALT image tag on your website or blog?
Basic OnPage SEO Tips – The Image ALT Tag by Jan Kearney
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Don’t know if google still does that but it did at one time: there was one browser IE or FF (don’t remember) that picked the content of the ALT tag to pop up a little floating box when the mouse was hovering, and the other browser used the TITLE tag of the image for that. Smart as I am I just put both onto my images and used the same text in both.
It appears hat google severely punished me for that – none of those images were in image search. Removing one or rewording one slowly got those images back into the search results.
Hi Merlin! I’s FF that uses the title and I always forget to change it. Working on WordPress, it uses the filename complete with hyphens as the title. Google have clamped down on keyword stuffing so if your title and description are exactly the same all the time, then I can see why that would become a problem. Thanks for popping in and sharing your experience 🙂
Thanks for making it so easy to understand how ALT tags work and how to use them. I have to admit I don’t always because I didn’t completely understand what they did. Now I do :-).
Hi Nanette – now you have no excuse not to use them in every post 🙂 Thanks for calling in and taking the time to comment!
Hi Jan, very helpful advice as usual, keep up the good work.
I hope you’re putting it into practice Athena 🙂
I use wordpress SEO yoast Jan and I recently integrated a image plugin to go with that. You can put your ALT tags in from a little window which is quick and easy. One thing I will ask is with ALT tags can you include your target keyword in there as well.
Hi Craig – oooh Yoast’s WordPress SEO is my no1 fav plugin of all time. I don’t use a plugin for image tags these days as the WordPress upload feature has the boxes there to add them anyway now. There are plugins about that used to auto-add your target keywords, but I think these days it’s safer to manually put them in while you’re writing.
The alt tag is an ideal place to weave in your target keyword.
Thanks for popping in and taking the time to comment 🙂