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How to Write Effective Alt Texts

Alt texts or alt tags are important for websites as they give search engines a text alternative for image.

If someone is using screen readers to visit and go through the content of a website, alt texts will explain to the person what an image represents.

That means, alt texts can improve accessibility of images and in turn that of websites.

Alt texts are crucial factors in the SEO of a website as it can help a website in ranking when someone uses images search to find an image on the website.

You may like to read the article, Alt text and its impact on search rankings.

Google has produced guidelines for the effective usage of alt texts.

Tips for creating effective alt texts

• When you are creating an alt text make sure that it is useful and information rich. Alt texts should be able to explain what the image represents.

• Keywords in the alt text should be used carefully and no keyword stuffing should be done as it will make the website appear as a spam website. Adding keywords in alt texts only for the sake of SEO could be unfavourable to the website. For SEO of a website, keyword stuffing must be avoided like the plague.

• The use of responsive websites is important for better ranking. While creating responsive websites, make sure to use responsive images on the website. It will go a long way in making sure that your website is accessible and readable on different devices. When you use responsive images, the audience will be able to see and understand the images better.

• Alt texts should be descriptive and describe the image clearly. For example, if it is the image of a mountain, the alt text should not only say, “image of a mountain”, but must say, “image of the tallest mountain in the whole of India by name Kangchenjunga”.

• Not only must the alt texts be descriptive and describe the image clearly, but it must also describe the context of the image in the webpage. If we take the above example, you must also say in the alt texts, why the image of the mountain Kangchenjunga was used in the webpage. That means, the alt text must be, “image of the tallest mountain in the whole of India by name Kangchenjunga used to compare its height with that of Mt Everest”.

You can find more information from Google images best practices.

If you don’t know how to add relevant alt texts for your website images, contact me now.