Today, google shows images in the SERPs. It means, even if you have implemented the best SEO practices and have missed the image alt texts, you could still miss out another organic traffic source that is your website images.
How to not miss this source of organic traffic? Image alt text can help you fill this room. In this piece, we’ll cover how to write alt text for images so that you can boost your rankings and attract more organic traffic.
What is alt text?
Also known as alt tags and alt descriptions, alt text is a combination of words that appears in the place of an image if the image fails to load by any chance. This text helps the tools describe images to the users and allows the search engine to crawl these images better and rank your website.
Whether you do SEO or not for your business, optimizing your website images alt text Is your checkpoint to create a better user experience for the visitors, despite how they first found you.
Why Image alt text important?
Image alt text is important for three reasons:
- Accessibility
- User experience
- Image traffic
Understanding these reasons help you in writing effective image alt texts.
Accessibility
Any web page with images should have information about the image. If the person is using screen reader to understand the content of the page.
An image with no description is not helpful for the user using screen reader and has a negative effect on user experience.
Alt text makes sure that your images are accessible to all the users.
User Experience
Alt text gives accessibility and a better user experience to all the users. If a user visits your website and the image fails to load. Instead of seeing the broken image icon, they will see the alt text added in the images.
For example, a user comes to your website and for any reason the image fails to load, they will see the alt text and will get the idea what the image is about. This helps in providing a better user experience than no alt tags.
Image Traffic
Another thing that alt text does for you is that it gets your images shown in search results. Image pack are results displayed on the SERPs; it may appear on any organic position.
And, images that appears in the SERPs may have a chance to attract more organic traffic.
How to Add Alt texts in Images?
When you upload an image, there is an option where it says “alt text”. In the alt text field add the image alt tag it will help in optimizing the image.
Image Alt Text Best Practices
Ultimately, the image alt text should be more specific but also describes the topic of the webpage it is supporting. Get the idea so far? Here are important keys to write the effective image alt text:
- Describe the image, and be specific. Use the image subject and topic guide you.
- Add context that relates to the topic of the page. If the image doesn’t show a known place or person, then add text according to the on content of the page.
- Keep your alt text fewer than 125 characters. Screen-reading tools mostly don’t read alt texts at this point, removing lengthy alt text when verbalizing this description for the visually impaired.
- Don’t start alt text with “picture of…” or “Image of…” Jump right to the image’s description. Screen-reading tools will automatically identify it as an image.
By Following these steps you can get the optimized SEO Alt Tags Prestashop.