What is Alt text and why is it important?

Alt text – or alternate text – is the text you use to describe the images on your website to people who are unable to see them. These could be the visually impaired or users whose images cannot be displayed due to a slow connection or an error. Alt text also applies to tools such as screen readers and browsers that block images.

Alt text is a great place to add your main keywords to improve your ranking in image searches. However, take care not to use irrelevant keywords to describe your images. It’s also good to remember to keep your text concise, yet descriptive. Moreover, always strive to write for people, not search engines.

As you may have guessed by now, Alt text is an essential and necessary tool to boost your search engine optimisation (SEO) – and here’s why.

The importance of alt text

Alt text is important if images fail to load. Images don’t load for all sorts of reasons so when you have your alt text in place, visitors to your web page can at least still understand what image should have been there.

Alt text is important for search engines. As we mentioned in some of our previous blogs, search engines crawl web pages in order to find relevant information. It’s easy for these crawlers to understand the text on a web page, but images are difficult to read. Therefore, if your images have Alt text, you make the crawlers’ job much easier, and you’ll have much better SEO results.

Alt text is important for the visually impaired. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who is visually impaired… Can you imagine the frustration of searching the Internet and not being able to understand a blog or news article simply because the images have irrelevant or incorrect Alt text? Therefore, it’s so important to have contextual Alt text that will explain your images in detail.

They say that a picture is worthy of a thousand words. Now, your Alt text doesn’t have to be that long, but Alt text is important, and you’ll reap the benefits when you start using them.

As the IoT-enabled world becomes increasingly crowded on a day-by-day basis, the need to optimise your website becomes increasingly important. In fact, one might argue that optimising your website for search engine optimisation purposes has become a business imperative.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Web Analytics is not a luxury anymore but an undeniable necessity. The Digital School of Marketing’s SEO and Web Analytics Course will teach you what it will take for your website to reach the number one spot on the search engine results pages. If you have a passion for online marketing, statistics – and have the technical knowledge of how to create websites – then this course is for you!