Image Alt Text: What It Is, How to Write It, and Why It Matters to SEO

Improve your website with effective technical SEO. Start by conducting this audit.

Today, nearly 19% of Google’s SERPs show images. That means, despite your best SEO efforts, you could still miss out on another organic traffic source: your website’s images.

How do you get in on this traffic source? Image alt text. In this piece, we’ll cover how to write image alt text so your images rank highly in search engines and drive traffic.

Table of Contents

What is alt text?
Why is image alt text important?
How to Add Alt Text to Your Images
3 Image Alt Text Examples
Image Alt Text Best Practices
How Alt Text Affects SEO

Whether or not you perform SEO for your business, optimizing your website’s image alt text is your ticket to creating a better user experience for your visitors, no matter how they first found you.

Why is image alt text important?

Image alt text is important for three reasons: accessibility, user experience, and image traffic. Understanding these reasons will help you write effective alt text for all of your images. Let’s dive in.

Accessibility

In 1999, W3C published its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 to explain how to make content more accessible for users with disabilities. One of these guidelines was to “Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content.” It meant any web page with images (or movies, sounds, applets, etc.) should include equivalent information to its visuals or auditory content.

First and foremost, descriptive text alternatives to auditory and visual content ensure everyone can benefit from the content you share, especially those with visual impairments who may use screen readers to absorb the content on a webpage. An image without a description isn’t helpful for someone using that technology and creates a poor user experience and, in some cases, poor brand perception.

For example, say a web page contains an image of an upward arrow that links to a table of contents. A text equivalent might be “Go to table of contents.” This would allow a user with a screen reader or other assistive technology to understand the purpose of the image without seeing it.

In other words, alt text helps ensure your visual content is accessible to all users, regardless of their visual ability.

User Experience

Alt text promotes accessibility and provides a better user experience to all users. For example, say a visitor has a low bandwidth connection, so your images don’t load. Instead of just seeing a broken link icon, they’ll also see alt text to glean what the image conveys.

For example, a user on your site might be able to see the image on the left. If they can’t, due to whatever reason, they’ll hear or see the alt text on the …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog