Optimizing for Images
In case you’re still wondering why you should optimize for images when checking and maintaining your blog or website, then take a look at the screenshot below:
The screenshot above is the first result we usually get from Google’s SERP after searching for the term “email newsletter design”.
Notice how these Newsletter Design images have almost completely taken over Google. They fully outranked millions of other websites. They appeared before all other organic text result.
Yes, Images are THAT important!
In this fast moving world, content creators feel the need to add more and more images to illustrate their topics and convey their message. So if you’re writing about “Art”, then Artful images are going to be crucial at some point for better reading experience.
Even screenshots are a great way to decorate and optimize your content. Forget “Art”, what if you’re guiding your visitors on how to add alt texts or change the site titles. No matter how good you are at writing, they’re more likely to understand you better visually by seeing images.
If the content you’re creating is about a topic that requires the support of visuals, consider how your audience might prefer to find answers to their questions on that topic. In many cases, Google searchers don’t want the typical blue, hyperlinked search result: they might want the image itself, embedded inside your webpage.
One very important thing an image alt text can do in your favor is to turn your images into hyperlinked search results: giving your website yet another way to receive organic visitors.
What is Alt Text
Sometimes called “alt tags” or “alt descriptions”, an alt text (alternative text) is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a website in case that same image fails to load on the user’s screen.
But this text also helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and facilitates for search engines to better crawl and rank you site. When you add alt text for an image, if the image can’t be displayed, it appears inside the container of the image.
So even if you don’t care enough about SEO per see, optimizing your site’s image alt text is a great way to create a better user experience for visitors on your website. SO DO IT!
Alt Text is basically an essential thing when optimizing images for better results when ranking. Simple as that.
Benefits of Alt Text to Imag
The benefits can be described in two words: Better SEO!
Search engine crawlers get better image content and description when an image has an alt text/tag imbedded. It also helps for indexing those images accurately.
Whenever you upload an image to your site, you should always write alt text because it is a good opportunity to improve your user accessibility and experiences.
(Insert SEO image)
Let me explain a little further about the relation between SEO and Alt Text.
SEO Benefits of Adding Alt Text
Search engines and other robots cannot interpret Images the way we humans do. We see the image of a dog and immediately recognize the dog. Robots can’t do that and they need to read a sort of backend description which you’re supposed to add. So when you upload images properly formatted with a good alt text, it contributes to the efforts in indexing pages and to rank it. (Yes, we humans still have some advantages over robots when seeing images!)
How to add Alt Text to your images?
In most content management systems (CMS), clicking on an image in the body of a blog post produces an image optimization or rich text module, where you can create and change the image’s alt text.
It’s as simple as that!
Your alt text is then automatically written into the webpage’s HTML source code, where you can edit the image’s alt text further if your CMS doesn’t have an easily editable alt text window.
How to Add Alt Text using WordPress?
The good news is, almost all WordPress themes work the same way when it comes to formatting alt tags. They make life easy because you only need to click on the image and type your text.
So let’s take a very famous and popular theme like Astra’s Elementor and use it as our main example. The other themes vary a little but the main concept remains. So if you’re using Themify or Divy or whatever, you’re going to be OKAY!
How to Add Elementor Alt Text
With a built-in option on WordPress, Elementor allows you to add alt text in images.It is super easy to add alt texts when you are building pages in Elementor, and here’s how: click on the image you want to add alt text and you will get an image box from the Elementor editor.
In case you’re still wondering why you should optimize for images when checking and maintaining your blog or website, then take a look at the screenshot below:
The screenshot above is the first result we usually get from Google’s SERP after searching for the term “email newsletter design”.
Notice how these Newsletter Design images have almost completely taken over Google. They fully outranked millions of other websites. They appeared before all other organic text result.
Yes, Images are THAT important!
In this fast moving world, content creators feel the need to add more and more images to illustrate their topics and convey their message. So if you’re writing about “Art”, then Artful images are going to be crucial at some point for better reading experience.
Even screenshots are a great way to decorate and optimize your content. Forget “Art”, what if you’re guiding your visitors on how to add alt texts or change the site titles. No matter how good you are at writing, they’re more likely to understand you better visually by seeing images.
If the content you’re creating is about a topic that requires the support of visuals, consider how your audience might prefer to find answers to their questions on that topic. In many cases, Google searchers don’t want the typical blue, hyperlinked search result: they might want the image itself, embedded inside your webpage.
One very important thing an image alt text can do in your favor is to turn your images into hyperlinked search results: giving your website yet another way to receive organic visitors.
What is Alt Text
Sometimes called “alt tags” or “alt descriptions”, an alt text (alternative text) is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a website in case that same image fails to load on the user’s screen.
But this text also helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and facilitates for search engines to better crawl and rank you site. When you add alt text for an image, if the image can’t be displayed, it appears inside the container of the image.
So even if you don’t care enough about SEO per see, optimizing your site’s image alt text is a great way to create a better user experience for visitors on your website. SO DO IT!
Alt Text is basically an essential thing when optimizing images for better results when ranking. Simple as that.
Benefits of Alt Text to Imag
The benefits can be described in two words: Better SEO!
Search engine crawlers get better image content and description when an image has an alt text/tag imbedded. It also helps for indexing those images accurately.
Whenever you upload an image to your site, you should always write alt text because it is a good opportunity to improve your user accessibility and experiences.
(Insert SEO image)
Let me explain a little further about the relation between SEO and Alt Text.
SEO Benefits of Adding Alt Text
Search engines and other robots cannot interpret Images the way we humans do. We see the image of a dog and immediately recognize the dog. Robots can’t do that and they need to read a sort of backend description which you’re supposed to add. So when you upload images properly formatted with a good alt text, it contributes to the efforts in indexing pages and to rank it. (Yes, we humans still have some advantages over robots when seeing images!)
How to add Alt Text to your images?
In most content management systems (CMS), clicking on an image in the body of a blog post produces an image optimization or rich text module, where you can create and change the image’s alt text.
It’s as simple as that!
Your alt text is then automatically written into the webpage’s HTML source code, where you can edit the image’s alt text further if your CMS doesn’t have an easily editable alt text window.
How to Add Alt Text using WordPress?
The good news is, almost all WordPress themes work the same way when it comes to formatting alt tags. They make life easy because you only need to click on the image and type your text.
So let’s take a very famous and popular theme like Astra’s Elementor and use it as our main example. The other themes vary a little but the main concept remains. So if you’re using Themify or Divy or whatever, you’re going to be OKAY!
How to Add Elementor Alt Text
With a built-in option on WordPress, Elementor allows you to add alt text in images.It is super easy to add alt texts when you are building pages in Elementor, and here’s how: click on the image you want to add alt text and you will get an image box from the Elementor editor.
Click on the image from the Image Box and the media library containing images will be displayed. You can see the Alt Text option displaying at the right side of the window. Now you can add the alt text easily from here. Go ahead and input a title as well for better reach. Just make sure to follow the rules I’ll mention in a bit.
The most important rule of alt text?
Be descriptive and specific.
But also keep in mind however, that this alt text rule won’t work if your alt text doesn’t also consider the image’s context.
Let’s illustrate this with some examples:
Good & Bad Image Alt Tag Examples
1. Keyword vs. Detail
Bad Alt Tag
alt=”Notaclinic Agency Staff Beirut Branding & Marketing workplace Working”
What’s wrong with the line of alt text above? Too many words but not enough said. Google Search Engine is smarter than this. It will immediately assume that we’re stuffing keywords only for the sake of ranking. That usually doesn’t work well with Google: It’s called “keyword stuffing”. Using alt text to stuff keywords into fragmented sentences adds too much fluff to the image and not enough context.
In fact, the alt text above makes it hard for Google to understand how the image relates to the rest of the page or post it’s published on, and that prevents the image from even ranking for the related long tail keywords that have higher levels of interest behind them.
Good Alt Text
With the bad alt text (above) in mind, better alt text for this image might be:
alt=”Logan Paul sucker punching Floyd Mayweather in Hard Rock Stadium, Miami Gardens”
3. Specificity vs. Context
Both images above have clear context that can help us write good alt text. But what if the image doesn’t have an actual official context by which to describe it?
In this case, you’re going to need to use the topic of the article (or webpage) to which you’re publishing the image.
So Here are some bad and good examples of alt text based on the reason you’re publishing it:
For an Article About Attending Graphic Design Courses
Bad Alt Text
alt=”Woman pointing to a person’s computer screen”
This line of alt tag above would be usually considered decent alt text, but since we’re publishing an article about attending Graphic Design School, we’re going to need to be more keyword related when putting the text, otherwise we’re missing out on a chance to target some valuable keywords and rank at the top. Simply because those keywords are what help Google associate the image (and its context) with the article itself.
Good Alt Text
A better alt text for this image might be:
alt=”Graphic Design professor pointing to a student’s computer screen”
Best Practices for Alt Text
So are we getting the hang of it? In a few words, the image alt text needs to be specific but also representative of the topic of the webpage it’s supporting.
Here are a few important keys to writing effective image alt tag when optimizing for SEO:
⦁ Describe the image while being specific: You have to use the image’s context to guide you when describing it.
⦁ Maintain the alt text fewer than 125 characters: Screen-reading tools typically stop reading alt text at this point. They cut off long-winded alt text at awkward moments when verbalizing this description for the visually impaired. So don’t bother making it longer than that.
⦁ Never start the alt text with “picture of ” or “Image of”: Screen-reading tools (and most importantly Google) will by itself already identify it as an image from the article’s HTML source code.
⦁ Use important keywords, but don’t stuff or force them where they don’t belong: Only include your article’s target keyword if it’s easily included in your alt text. If not, consider semantic keywords, or just the most important terms within a long-tail keyword. Especially if the keyword you’re trying to rank for is very competitive, the semantic keywords, long-tail variations and synonyms can help you rank higher or even find your niche.
⦁ Don’t stick your keyword into every single image’s alt text: If your blog post contains a series of body images, include your keyword in at least one or two of those images. Pick the most relevant and important ones and work on those. Focus on hero images and banners, or big pictures that are crucial to the article or page.
Click on the image from the Image Box and the media library containing images will be displayed. You can see the Alt Text option displaying at the right side of the window. Now you can add the alt text easily from here. Go ahead and input a title as well for better reach. Just make sure to follow the rules I’ll mention in a bit.
The most important rule of alt text?
Be descriptive and specific.
But also keep in mind however, that this alt text rule won’t work if your alt text doesn’t also consider the image’s context.
Let’s illustrate this with some examples:
Good & Bad Image Alt Tag Examples
1. Keyword vs. Detail
Bad Alt Tag
alt=”Notaclinic Agency Staff Beirut Branding & Marketing workplace Working”
What’s wrong with the line of alt text above? Too many words but not enough said. Google Search Engine is smarter than this. It will immediately assume that we’re stuffing keywords only for the sake of ranking. That usually doesn’t work well with Google: It’s called “keyword stuffing”. Using alt text to stuff keywords into fragmented sentences adds too much fluff to the image and not enough context.
In fact, the alt text above makes it hard for Google to understand how the image relates to the rest of the page or post it’s published on, and that prevents the image from even ranking for the related long tail keywords that have higher levels of interest behind them.
Good Alt Text
With the bad alt text (above) in mind, better alt text for this image might be:
Alt=”Notaclinic Branding Agency employees working on the newest marketing project, Beirut office.”
3. Specificity vs. Context
Both images above have clear context that can help us write good alt text. But what if the image doesn’t have an actual official context by which to describe it?
In this case, you’re going to need to use the topic of the article (or webpage) to which you’re publishing the image.
So Here are some bad and good examples of alt text based on the reason you’re publishing it:
For an Article About Attending Graphic Design Courses
Bad Alt Text
alt=”Woman pointing to a person’s computer screen”
This line of alt tag above would be usually considered decent alt text, but since we’re publishing an article about attending Graphic Design School, we’re going to need to be more keyword related when putting the text, otherwise we’re missing out on a chance to target some valuable keywords and rank at the top. Simply because those keywords are what help Google associate the image (and its context) with the article itself.
Good Alt Text
A better alt text for this image might be:
alt=”Graphic Design professor pointing to a student’s computer screen”
Best Practices for Alt Text
So are we getting the hang of it? In a few words, the image alt text needs to be specific but also representative of the topic of the webpage it’s supporting.
Here are a few important keys to writing effective image alt tag when optimizing for SEO:
⦁ Describe the image while being specific: You have to use the image’s context to guide you when describing it.
⦁ Maintain the alt text fewer than 125 characters: Screen-reading tools typically stop reading alt text at this point. They cut off long-winded alt text at awkward moments when verbalizing this description for the visually impaired. So don’t bother making it longer than that.
⦁ Never start the alt text with “picture of ” or “Image of”: Screen-reading tools (and most importantly Google) will by itself already identify it as an image from the article’s HTML source code.
⦁ Use important keywords, but don’t stuff or force them where they don’t belong: Only include your article’s target keyword if it’s easily included in your alt text. If not, consider semantic keywords, or just the most important terms within a long-tail keyword. Especially if the keyword you’re trying to rank for is very competitive, the semantic keywords, long-tail variations and synonyms can help you rank higher or even find your niche.
⦁ Don’t stick your keyword into every single image’s alt text: If your blog post contains a series of body images, include your keyword in at least one or two of those images. Pick the most relevant and important ones and work on those. Focus on hero images and banners, or big pictures that are crucial to the article or page.
Conclusion
Alt texts come in super handy, mainly for SEO reasons but also for accessibility purposes, particularly for users viewing a webpage on a browser where images can’t be processed. Because alt text for images performs a crucial role in the successful optimization of web content for search engines and improves dramatically the user experience.
Now, where do you start when developing alt text for your blog posts and webpages?
We recommend performing a basic audit of your existing content to see where you can incorporate alt text into your previously untagged pictures. Watch to see how your organic traffic changes among the pages that you give new alt tags. It eventually become a fun routine!
The more you optimize your images, the better your SEO strategy will be moving forward.
Good luck and Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to find out about our next articles.
Don’t forget to share this post, follow on social media and contact us for any information or suggestion.
Conclusion
Alt texts come in super handy, mainly for SEO reasons but also for accessibility purposes, particularly for users viewing a webpage on a browser where images can’t be processed. Because alt text for images performs a crucial role in the successful optimization of web content for search engines and improves dramatically the user experience.
Now, where do you start when developing alt text for your blog posts and webpages?
We recommend performing a basic audit of your existing content to see where you can incorporate alt text into your previously untagged pictures. Watch to see how your organic traffic changes among the pages that you give new alt tags. It eventually become a fun routine!
The more you optimize your images, the better your SEO strategy will be moving forward.
Good luck and Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to find out about our next articles.
Don’t forget to share this post, follow on social media and contact us for any information or suggestion.