Alt and Title Text

If you are for instance a blogger or write articles for an online magazine or newspaper, you encounter this question on a probably daily basis: should I add an image to my article? The answer is “Yes”. Images make an article more vivid and can actually contribute to improving the SEO for your article. In this post, I’d like to explain the steps that should be taken to fully optimize an image for SEO.

Alt text and title text
The alt text is added to an image so there will be a descriptive text when the image for whatever reason can’t be displayed to the visitor. I can’t put it any better than Wikipedia: “In situations where the image is not available to the reader, perhaps because they have turned off images in their web browser or are using a screen reader due to a visual impairment, the alternative text ensures that no information or functionality is lost.” Be sure to add alt texts. Make sure the alt text includes your SEO keyword and relates to / describes the image. DigitalSherpa did a nice article on How to Write SEO-Friendly Alt-Text For Your Images.
More information here: http://karimbuzdar.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-to-generate-traffic-by-optimizing.html

Why Use Alt Tag?

At a minimum, you want to fill in the alt text field.

Not including the “alt tag” is one of the most common SEO mistakes I see new website owners make. This is sloppy SEO for two reasons:

Search engine robots can’t read images without text, plus you’ve missed a keyword opportunity.
Not labeling images is a poor user experience for those who have disabled images in their browsers or for those with visual or certain cognitive disabilities.
“Alt text” stands for “alternative information.” According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the “alt” attribute specifies an alternate text for user agents that cannot display images, forms or applets. For example, the user agent Googlebot cannot “see” images directly. Instead, it relies on the information in the alt attribute to determine what the image is and what to display in search results.

More info here: http://karimbuzdar.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-to-generate-traffic-by-optimizing.html

Optimizing Alt Tags for Better Search Ranking

You are already optimizing your site for search engines, right? But I bet you aren’t optimizing your images for search traffic!

I know, Google image search only gets a half a percent of Google’s overall traffic. But due to blended search results, images actually get a lot more traffic than that half a percent.

Unlike before, when you search for terms like “golden gate bridge” now, you actually see images of the Golden Gate Bridge on the search listings page. For this reason, it’s important to optimize your images for search engines.

Here’s how you can make your images search engine friendly:

Alt tags

Because search engines can’t read images, you need to use alt tags to help describe your image.

Golden Gate Bridge covered by fog

If you have an image of the Golden Gate Bridge during a foggy day, your alt tag should read something like this:

Alt=”Golden Gate Bridge covered by fog”

Here is what the full image code should look like:

<img src=”http://www.quicksprout.com/foggygoldengatebridge.jpg” alt=”Golden Gate Bridge covered by fog” />

The key to creating good alt tags consists of three points:

Image needs a proper description, without keyword stuffing.
It should be keyword rich.
It needs to be short and to the point.

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http://karimbuzdar.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-to-generate-traffic-by-optimizing.html

INTRODUCTION TO ALT ATTRIBUTES

The purpose of alt attributes is to provide a description of the contents of an image file. One of the most cited uses of alt attributes is to provide text for visitors who can’t see images in their browsers. This includes visitors using browsers that cannot display images or have image display disabled, visually impaired visitors, and those visitors who use screen readers. If a viewer can see your images, alt attributes will also show when the user hovers over your image.

If images do not show in a browser, for whatever reason, the alt text will show in place of the images, giving context to what the images actually contain for those who can’t see them.

In addition to ensuring the content in your image is communicated whether the image shows or not, effectively using alt text can also be a great way to improve your site’s placement in search engine result pages because it allows the images on your pages to rank in image search results.

For example, the alt attribute on the image below is: photo editing tools for non-designers google search results.

I used this image in a recent blog post that critiqued popular online photo editing tools for the average internet user. Using this alt text helps my image show up in organic results when someone searches for a something regarding free online photo editing tools. In addition, the alt text would show in place of the image if it failed to load.

As I mentioned above, if the image does load, the alt text will still display when a user hovers over the image in most browsers.

The HTML code for this image’s alt tag looks like this (the alt text is shown in italics).

Tip: If you use WordPress, it’s quite easy to insert alt attributes into photos. When you upload an image, just insert your text into the “Alternative Text” dialogue box and your image will be all set with alt text.

Just like the visually impaired, search engines can’t see images on websites. Even if an image has text embedded within it, search engines are unable to crawl that text. So by not creating alt attributes for each and every image on your site, you lose a huge opportunity to be as visible as possible online.

But in just what way do alt attributes help SEO? Search engines use the information that alt text provides to determine the best image to return for a search query. This is a great way to bring new visitors to your site and it helps to increase your rankings with the search engines. In the process, you will also give yourself an SEO edge on your competitors.

Thus, alt attributes are a great place to utilize your keywords and help increase your chances of showing up in image searches. However, make sure that the attributes are appropriate for the image. For example, you wouldn’t want to label an image of a dog with alt text “affordable digital marketing services in Sioux Falls” — this just doesn’t make sense. If you try to trick search engines like this, you could actually hurt your SEO instead of help. So be true to your images.

Please visit this blog post for more details on alt attributes:

http://karimbuzdar.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-to-generate-traffic-by-optimizing.html

How to Write SEO-Friendly Alt-Text For Your Images

How to Write SEO-Friendly Alt-Text For Your Images.

How to Write SEO-Friendly Alt-Text For Your Images

While adding alt-text to your images can help to make your content more accessible on the web, it also serves other functions as well, such as helping those with visual and certain cognitive disabilities understand the context of your image.

Since images provide you with an another opportunity to boost your search rank, so it would be foolish to not assign alt-text to them. One of the benefits of writing alt-text is that it creates another place within your content to include a targeted keyword, and search engines are less likely to penalize you using a keyword here (assuming you are not a keyword spammer).

To help you write great alt-text that is SEO friendly, we wanted to share the following tips with you:

While other words can be included in your alt-text as well, the text that is written in the image should absolutely be included.

Sometimes, images such as company logos imply text but do not actually include it. In these cases, you should include the company name in your alt-text.

Think of it like a tweet. As a rule of thumb, your alt-text should be between 5 and 15 words. If you include too much alt-text, it can be difficult for search engines to decipher it. Shorter alt-text means faster page load time, which is what you obviously want.

If an image is too technical to describe using 15 words or less, consider talking about your image in the body of your content. In this scenario, it’s advisable to use an alt tag that will refer visually  impaired readers to the body of your content where they can find a more thorough description of the image.

Please follow this link for more details about Alt text:

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Alternative Text for Images

Alternative text is text associated with an image that serves the same purpose and conveys the same essential information as the image. In situations where the image is not available to the reader, perhaps because they have turned off images in their web browser or are using a screen reader due to a visual impairment, the alternative text ensures that no information or functionality is lost. Absent or unhelpful alternative text can be a source of frustration for visually impaired users of the Web.

On Wikipedia, alternative text is typically supplied through a combination of the image caption and the text supplied for the image alt parameter in theMediaWiki markup. The following example produces the image on the right:

The alt parameter text (“Painting of Napoleon Bonaparte in His Study at the Tuileries”) is not normally visible to readers; however, it may be displayed by web browsers when images are switched off, or read out loud by screen readers for those with visual impairment, and can be used by search engines to determine the content of the image. In keeping with other Internet guidelines, the term “alt text” (in a code font) is used here to refer to the text supplied for the image alt parameter and which generates text for the HTML alt attribute; the term “alternative text” refers to the text equivalent for an image, regardless of where that text resides.

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What is Alt Text?

Alt text is the alternative text used by text browsers and other Web user agents that can’t view images. It is also one of the only attributes required by the imagetag. By writing effective alt text you insure that your Web pages are accessible, and give you more places to add that search engines won’t penalize you for.

Remember, as well, that images like logos imply text – for example, when you see the red ball icon on the About.com Web site, they mean “About.com“. So the alternative text should say “About.com” and not “company logo” or “About.com logo”.

The longer your alternative text, the more difficult it will be to read by text browsers. It can be tempting to write long sentences of alternative text, but keeping them short keeps your pages smaller and smaller pages download faster.

A good rule of thumb for alternative text is to keep it between 5 and 15 words.

People often forget that alternative text can be a great place to put search engine keywords. Alternative text is important and required on images, so search engines are unlikely to penalize you for putting keywords there. But remember that your first priority is to your readers. Keyword spamming in alternative text can be detected and search engines change their rules all the time to prevent spammers.

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