One area where web designers and search engine optimization (SEO)
professionals usually butt heads is over the use of images as text
instead of actual plain text, usually done in the navigation or other
important elements of a website. This can cripple an SEO implementation
by limiting the effectiveness of elements that could have been textually
based, as text is much more effective for interlinking. This is just
one area where image alt text can be very useful.
Alt text � which are found in the �alt� portion of image tag � allows
you to add a short descriptor of the image, whether it�s a photograph, a
navigational element or some other useful image or graphic. Alt text
allows you to describe to users who hover their mouse over an image what
they�re seeing, but for SEO, Services, it also gives the search engine
more information than the image�s file name might. Optimizing image alt
text is a part of any effective on-site SEO campaign, and in this
article, we�ll give you some tips on how to optimize alt texts to make
them more useful and effective.
First, if there is text in your image, make sure your alt text matches
it precisely. If it�s a one-word image such as menu item, for example,
you would include this word in your alt text, as well as possibly a
short description of the menu item. This gives the search engine some
idea as to what that element is all about.
Secondly, for pictures and other descriptive images, you want at most a
sentence describing what users can see in that picture, and again, it
has to match what the picture actually is. Google�s crawlers can�t see
images, but humans can, and if one of Google�s engineers see that you�re
filling your image alt tags with irrelevant information, it could raise
red flags.
Finally, not every image has to have an alt text in it. You wouldn�t add
alt text to transparent spacer images used to align other elements of a
page together, for example, but you would add alt text to all important
and relevant images on a page. Alt text doesn�t carry the weight of
actual readable text in the eyes of the search engines, but it�s better
having it than not.
