Alt Tag

Has there ever been an instance where you placed your mouse over an image and some text appeared on the screen? Every element on your webpage matters and to optimize your website in the right sense, you need to ensure that every element of your website works positively to gain more visibility. Alt tags have been used by search engine optimization professionals to improve site ranking and to convince customers that your website has the information they’re looking for. Alt tag also known as alternative text tag is generally used by SEO professionals to display more information about the images that are used on the webpage.

Why are Alt Tags Important?

Images not only make your website appear aesthetic, they also add meaning to the content available on the webpage. Great content along with effective images can make a huge difference, but what if the images fail to load? If the images fail to render on the webpage, alt tags will salvage the situation. With the help of alt tags, visitors will be able to understand what image should be there even when they are unable to see it.

From a search engine’s point of view, it is difficult for crawlers to understand what the image is because there is no text. Alt tags describe the information of the image to search engines which make the crawler’s job easier, allowing search engines to provide users with better search results when performing an image search.

Best Practices for Writing Alt Tags

Writing alt tags sounds like an easy job because it conveys contextual information that explains the image in more details. However, there are various factors that you need to keep in mind when writing alt tags to optimize the website in the right way.

If the image has some text, your alt tag must repeat the same text. You can certainly add more text to the alt tags, but you have to focus on the right words that will be used in the alt tags.

Short alt tags make more sense than longer ones. It helps in downloading the page faster and users can immediately place the mouse over the image and understand what it means in simple words.

Using the right keywords in the alt tags also impacts the online visibility of the site positively. When you are using too many images, you can use the right keywords to improve visibility in the search engine result pages. However, don’t overdo it as it will lead to keyword spamming.