Alt text or alternative text describes an image on a web page with the audio. Image alt texts are really important as it improves the accessibility of the contents, improves topical relevance and serves as anchor text for image links. Alt texts are being used for image optimization by the top SEO service providers like SEO Agency Melbourne. It is especially helpful for visually-impaired users. They can consume the content only when the Alt text is used.
What is Alt text and why it is important for SEO?
Alt texts or alt attributes are the written copy using HTML code to describe an image. It is the alternative of the image, also known as image SEO. Alt text can convert an image into both audio files and text writing. So, if a visual-impaired consumer is visiting your site and you have used Alt text, then the customer can easily consume your content through audio. If a customer has some network issues and images of your site fail to load, at that time images of your page will show as a text. Summation of the above-mentioned effects will improve the rank of a website in search engines, which is the ultimate target of the SEO.
How to optimize Image Alt texts?
The process of image optimization using alt text is so short and simple, but for the successful implication of the process, you should keep some points in mind. These are:
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Describe the image as specifically as possible
Remember the texts you use, should be designed to provide appropriate explanations of the images for the consumers who can’t see those. You should describe the images as correctly as you can with HTML Alt text. If your content has some images which are only for design purpose and do not convey any message, you should keep those within the CSS instead of HTML.
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File format and compression of the images
Along with metadata optimization, you should make sure that the image is technically optimized. You will get three options for images-.PNG (higher quality),.JPG (lower quality) and.GIF (animated photos). You have to choose as per your need. Also, file size is not recommended longer than 100KB for fast loading. To you should compress the image as much as possible.
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Keep it short as much as you can
Most of the screen readers do not read alt texts over 125 characters. So we would like to suggest you that you should keep that within the mentioned limit.
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Use your keywords
Alt text provides you with a good opportunity to include your target keywords within a page. We will recommend you to take this opportunity as this can increase the relevance of your page to a particular search quarry. Your priority should be describing and providing context to the image as we have mentioned earlier, but you should also try to include your keywords if it makes sense.
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You should avoid keyword stuffing
We have told you that you can include your keyword as alt text, but you shouldn’t take it as an opportunity to stuff your keywords. It will not make much sense but will distract your consumer.
These are the basic things you must keep in mind while adding alt text. Then you simply have to add an alt attribute to the <img> tag of the HTML code.
As an example, if you want to describe the image of a red rooster through alt text, your alt text should be like this:
<img src=”bird.png” alt=”Red-crested rooster crowing”>
Conclusion
Optimization of images is simple, but it has proved effective, and we have explained why. We also have mentioned the process of alt text optimization. Hope you will imply the learning to increase the rank of your website.
