HOW TO USE ALT-TEXT BEST PRACTICES TO PUT YOUR BUSINESS IN FRONT OF CUSTOMERS
Use these Alt-text tips and tricks to put yourself in a position for local customers to find you and the services that you offer.
WHY IS ALT-TEXT IMPORTANT?
Optimizing your website’s image alt text will improve the user experience for your visitors, regardless of how they found your business. Therefore, what we are suggesting is that you should optimize all your images in a way that is understandable by search engines. In addition, you should make them accessible to people with disabilities. There are a lot of reasons to do this, as well. Here we will guide you through the exact, step-by-step procedure that you will need to follow to optimize each and every one of your images in a way that is both SEO-friendly and also helpful to your visitors.
Let’s talk about image alt text optimization for search engines. You should optimize your images so they’re suitable for search engines and helpful for users. But first, let’s zoom out a little bit to get additional context with SEO as a whole. SEO image optimization is not all there is to put your content on the first page of Google Search results.
This is a very specific optimization tactic we can use on an individual level in order to drive traffic and customers to your site. So keep that in mind. Within SEO, image alt text optimization is only one small piece of this entire SEO puzzle. So just getting this right, or just getting this wrong, is not enough to make or break you either way.
LET’S START OUT WITH FILE NAMES!
We should start out our optimization by looking at your image file names. I think it’s imperative to remember that search engines are not humans, right? Imagery is not viewed or seen the same way by them as it is by us. Therefore, SEOs or digital marketers need to do some things to help search engines. In order to give them some hints about what that image is about. Our goal is to make images visible to search engines by naming them correctly.
Alt text should also be properly set up for accessibility reasons. People with visual impairments or blindness use special browsers that read images to them. The alt text and the file names in our images can help. Users using special browsers like this will find it incredibly helpful.
WHAT ARE SOME ALT-TEXT BEST PRACTICES?
HOW TO QUICKLY ADD ALT-TEXT IN THE WORDPRESS CMS
Clicking on an image in WordPress opens the Block tab in the sidebar. Put your alt text in the empty field under “Image Settings.” Hit Update on your toolbar once you’re done. Additionally, you can access your image file names and image alt text, descriptions, and captions from your media library tab inside of your WordPress admin account. Do you know what the most critical rule is when it comes to alt text? Be specific and descriptive. However, keep in mind that alt text can lose its value if it doesn’t also consider the image’s context.
HOW LONG IS TOO LONG FOR ALT-TEXT?
Generally, alt text is 125 characters long, so it’s okay to fill it in as much as you’d like, as long as it’s reasonable. However, don’t forget to include the file name as well as your changes. It is very common to see image uploads named with a string of random characters or something like “image-home-3.jpg.” You should be more descriptive and avoid uploading images that will not benefit your search engine optimization efforts.
WHAT SHOULD THE ALT-TEXT FOR AN IMAGE BE?
Finally, I know this tactic is prone to over-optimization because I used to do it. When people first get into search engine optimization, they get really excited about it. They read through a downloaded SEO checklist and say, okay, here’s all the stuff I need to do to rank higher in Google and they get to work! But then they look at their images and realize they tend to overdo it. They stuff their image’s filenames and alt text or descriptions with too many keywords, so it ends up not being descriptive at all. Please avoid over-optimization if at all possible.
WHEN SHOULD I USE ALT TEXT?
Alt text should only be used when images add value to the content of the article. You will occasionally have images inside your content that are more decorative or technically unrelated to the content to some degree. These images don’t need to have any alt text included inside of them. Also, consider any images that are reused on multiple pages and make sure the alt text makes sense on both pages or duplicates of the image. If you are still unsure about when you should be using alt text check out this handy decision tree!
LET’S LOOK AT ALT TEXT EXAMPLES
Here’s a picture from our website on another page. This picture talks about page speed that we’ll refer back to later in this article since it’s related to optimizing your images too. In this graphic, we can see a few things that stand out. The image file name and alt text both tell us about the local citations and key citations. This information is presented in some type of dashboard as well.
The file name is listed as “key-local-seo-citations-for-local-business.WEPB”. The alt-text is formatted to match the current title as it is now. Occasionally we will see something more along the lines of “dashboard-citations.jpeg” and an empty alt tag. As you can see we attempted to describe the image as accurately as possible. We also included some of the keywords we identified during some keyword research performed before writing our article.
In order to figure out if your alt text and image file name are optimized, close your eyes and have someone read it aloud to you. Then, see if the image in your head matches what you meant. It’s a smart idea to make your file names and alt text more descriptive if you can’t picture them during this test. That’s a plus for search engines and just one more element of SEO. It’s also helpful for visually impaired and blind users from an accessibility perspective.
A WORD ABOUT IMAGE RESIZING
We can’t skip out on also taking some time to touch on image resizing as well in this guide! When someone views a web page, their device is accessing files that are stored on the server. If the files on the server are large, it makes it take longer for the website to load. Images and videos are usually the biggest files on a page, so they can’t fully load for a while. Often, text and other content loads before images, making the whole page lag. We love to use the WP-Rocket Plugin to help with optimizing the sizing of images for our clients!
BOOST YOUR LOCAL SEO & CONVERSIONS BY OPTIMIZING YOUR IMAGES
People with slower internet connections or mobile users will notice this impact on webpage speed. It’s very frustrating for mobile users to wait, and over half will usually leave your site if it doesn’t load in three seconds. You can damage your SEO ranking because every time someone leaves or bounces from your website, Google notices it and penalizes you.
Likewise, since July 2018, Google’s algorithm considers page speed when ranking pages. If you’re looking to rank higher, you should check your page speed. We have worked out a partnership with a plugin wp-rocket available on our resources page that can optimize with a single click.
According to a recent study by Portent.com,
- The difference in conversion rate between blazing-fast sites and modestly quick sites is astonishing. A site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds.
Wow! What does that mean for you though? If your website page speed is lacking you can use image optimization to help improve your user experience massively and affect your bottom line at the same time as part of a Local SEO strategy!
NOW YOU ARE READY TO GO OPTIMIZE SOME IMAGES
That’s really all there is to image alt-text best practices or image alt tag optimization. You should be prepared now to go out and tweak those images for your keywords and make some waves by bringing tons of customers to your business website. If you need additional help with developing those keywords and understanding which of them are the most valuable for your business stick around for our next article discussing keyword research!
