What is Alt Text?
You’re probably already optimizing your website’s content, headers, meta descriptions, and titles, why not the images?
Alt (alternative) tags and descriptions, also called alt text, make up the written copy that shows on a site when an image fails to load. It also increases a site’s accessibility, allowing visually impaired users with screen-reading tools to hear descriptions of the images.
Not only does it improve accessibility, but your SEO also benefits. Alt text helps search engines better crawl and rank your site!
How Alt Text Can Improve SEO
Google has stated that alt text along with page content and computer vision algorithms help to determine the subject of images. So when you add alt text to your images, Google has a better understanding of the whole webpage and increases the likelihood that your image will appear in search results.
Alt Text Best Practices
When adding alt text to your images there are a few key factors you should keep in mind.
- Provide a specific description of the contents of the image.
- Keep the text to 125 characters or less.
- Don’t start your text with “picture of” or “image of”. It’s already clear that the description is of an image, no need to say it twice.
- Use appropriate keywords but not too many.
- Check for spelling errors.
- Images that already have captions or descriptive text don’t need alt text.
Adding Image Alt Tags in WordPress
WordPress allows you to easily add alt descriptions to your images. Simply access your media library, click on the image you would like to add alt text to, and add your copy in the alt description section.
If you want an easy way to see which images on your site need optimizing, run a site audit. It will list all the images that are yet to have alt tags added to them!
