The Role of Alt Text in SEO: Going Beyond Accessibility

Nobody can deny the fact that SEO is an ever-changing process and small factors have significant impacts on the content and its visibility. Due to this, we can say that Alt Tags in SEO is one of the many essential details that cannot be overlooked in web content, although they are often left out when designing.

Originally, alt text was primarily used to provide information to the visually impaired, but it is now seen as a major factor for increasing web site rankings among search engines.

In this blog, I’m going to explain what Alt Text is and why it is significant not only from an accessibility perspective but also in the broader context of SEO In addition, I’m going to show how to use Alt Tags in SEO efficiently.

What is Alt Text?

An Alt text, short for an alternative text, is metadata that performs the function of describing an image on a webpage using HTML code.

It acts as the textual alternative to images in case users cannot display the image (having low vision, restricted Internet connection, or broken image links). Alt text is embedded into the HTML code of a webpage, and informs screen readers and search engines about the image they are displaying.

Did you know? To be more precise, well optimized alt text, not only gives more value to your website’s accessibility to the larger disabled community but also allows the search engines to properly interpret your images and thus enhancing your search visibility.

The Significance Of Alt Texts For Accessibility

Originally, alt text was developed strictly for enhancing accessibility of web content to viewers with impaired vision. Techniques such as using alt text tell the screen reader about the image so that those who cannot see it get to know about the content of the image and the rest of the page as well.

This is important in providing the website users with an easy time to navigate the website and make it ADA and WCAG Compliant. In addition, though, Alt Tags in SEO have evolved from their original function, influencing the relevancy of images to the generated tags and allowing search engine indexing and ranking.

How Alt Text Impacts SEO

Using effective alt text for images remains central to several SEO practices across websites. Let’s explore how Alt Tags in SEO can influence your site’s ranking:

1. Improves Image Search Ranking: Search engines cannot interpret images in the manner that humans can; therefore, they depend on the text values of an image. The user should always have well-written alt text to help the search engine understand the image and thus rank it better for image related searches. In specific cases where websites bear mainly graphic content, such as e-business sites, this may lead to higher exposure in Google Images as well as in other platforms.
2. Supports Overall Page Relevance: Everything on a webpage is reviewed by search engines when it crawls the page with the aim of rating the page to the query. Altogether, the use of alt text may enhance a page’s topicality by reiterating the content keywords and aiding search engine in the comprehension of the context of the page. Using Alt Tags in SEO tactfully increases the keyword density of the page without compromising its accessibility, and informs search engine bots your page is relevant to particular search terms.
3. Enhances User Experience: Not only does alt text help visually impaired users understand images, but it helps all users when images don’t load. However, sometimes an image on a page may not appear as a result of internet connectivity problems or a server problem. On such occasions alt text can allow other users to get some context, whether the images are available or not. This gives a better user experience and can result in a better SEO metrics like 'page dwell time'.
4. Optimizes for Voice Search: Because of the rise of voice search, optimizing your content for spoken queries has become even more important. This is because alt text augments your content in a more conversational way and can support indirect voice search optimization by providing a more descriptive textual figure to your content that better matches conversational search queries.
5. It enhances accessibility compliance and SEO Score: The higher the priority of accessibility becomes for search engines, sites that place the priority on accessibility are rewarded. For Google, when it comes to user experience ranking factors, they consider accessibility. Adding alt text to the images on your website helps improve your website accessibility score and may help increase your SEO performance in the process.

Tips for writing SEO effective alt Tags

How alt tags are written is what largely determines their effectiveness in SEO. Here are some best practices to ensure alt text is both user-friendly and SEO-optimized:

1. Be Descriptive but Concise: The image must be described clearly and concisely about what it is about. An alt tag should be a good description of the image so that people with a disability can understand the image on its own without reading the alt tag but not be overly lengthy. If you were to, for instance, write “shoes,” write it instead as “blue running shoes with white stripes on a wooden floor.” Placing descriptive alt text also helps search engines and those users search for information or products.
2. Include Keywords Naturally: The alt text should be rich with relevant keywords, as long as you don’t stuff in any keywords. If the keyword “Alt Tags in SEO” makes sense within the description, include it. For example, a descriptive and inclusive in keywords alt tag would be “Digital marketer explaining alt tags in SEO on a whiteboard”.
3. Avoid redundant words: An image in alt text doesn’t have to start with 'image of'/'photo of', because the screen readers already know this is an image. It jumps straight into the description. We don’t need to say, “Image of a woman using a laptop,” just “Woman using a laptop at a coffee shop.”
4. Focus on the content: If the image is decorative and nonessential to the page’s content, then the alt attribute can be left blank (alt=""). It allows screen readers to skip over the image and won't send unnecessary information to them. However, they should also include descriptive alt text for images that make sense with what they’re representing.
5. Keep it Relevant to the Content: The alt text should match up to the content of the page. If the page is all about SEO strategies and the image has something to do with keyword research from the title, make sure the alt text follows. The Alt tags associated with the page must correlate to the content on the page, which can help the page rank higher with search engines and more relevant to the user.

Don't Know How To Audit & Improve Your Alt Tags In SEO Strategy

Looking at your website’s alt tags can be one way to audit! Here’s how to conduct an effective audit:

1. Use SEO Tools: There are tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to check if images don’t have alt text or have the duplicate alt text.
2. Manually Review Key Pages: If it’s an important page, manually check the alt text for relevance and accuracy. It seems worth confirming that they provide value to users and search engines.
3. Optimize for Priority Images: Take, for example, images that are important for SEO, such as product images or graphics depicting major points.

Conclusion

In addition to accessibility, alt text is a fantastic way to boost SEO, increase user experience, and satisfy accessibility requirements.

For one, properly implemented alt tags in SEO can matter an awful lot in how your images or website content is recognized and ranked by search engines.

Writing descriptive, relevant, and keyword optimized alt text can help you boost your site’s visibility, enhance engagement, and provide a more inclusive experience for all users.

Are you ready to take your SEO up a level? If you need professional assistance, Connect with MadHawks, and let our SEO experts help you enhance accessibility and improve your search rankings through targeted Alt Tags in SEO. Don’t let your images go unnoticed and start harnessing the power of alt text!

This is what an optimized Alt Tags can do with your Search Console