The alt attribute, or alternative text, is a property most CSS-styled images have that allows you to specify a text description for this image. Writing good alt text actually serves a lot of purposes: it makes your images more accessible; search engines may index the alt attribute to provide some context for the graphic (textually-speaking); and if all else fails, you can also use alt-text as a caption when sharing an image on social media — which often takes context.
Whether you’re a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist or not, alt tags are a part of optimizing your images that are often forgotten. When you optimize your images you’re trying to give them the best chance to Alt text instagram, Alt text vs image description, rank in the search engines. Alt tags help with that. They tell the search engine bots what your image is and also tell people what they’re looking at.
How to write alt text for seo
Alt text is the text that appears when you hover over an image, and it’s a key element of SEO. In this post I’ll discuss why alt text is important, how to write good alt tags, and how to optimize images on Instagram.
Alt text provides context
Alt text is the text that appears when you hover over an image. It’s sometimes called a “tooltip,” but that’s not the official name. You see it in Google Image Search and on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram (although they call them “image descriptions”).
The purpose of alt text is to provide context for an image so people who can’t see it can understand what it depicts. The term “alt” stands for alternative — as in alternative text.
For example, if you had a photo of a dog barking at the camera, the alt tag could be something like “dog barking.” That way if someone were browsing photos with screen readers or other assistive devices that read out loud, they’d know that there was one in particular with a dog barking at them from inside its home — not just any old photo of dogs barking at things.
The alt attribute is a text that describes an image in HTML. The alt attribute can be used for SEO purposes but it’s not the only way to add descriptions to images.
The main task of alt text is to help search engines understand what an image contains and what it shows. Thanks to this, search engines can index images properly and display them correctly in a SERP.
In addition to SEO benefits, alt texts are also useful for people with sight problems or vision impairments because they describe what’s contained in an image.
How does it help?
Alt texts help you rank better for certain keywords: for example, if you have a picture of your product that includes the name of your product – like “Product X” – then you can use it as an opportunity to rank highly for searches like “Product X reviews” or “Product X price”.
It improves user experience: Google states that adding descriptive text to images improves user experience on the web and makes it easier for people to find things on the internet thanks to improved accessibility options offered by modern browsers such as screen readers or magnifiers. In fact, Google has stated that descriptive alt text will.
When you write blog posts and articles you’re writing for people, but when you upload images to social media, they are there to be seen by search engines.
So what do you do?
You can use alt text (alternative text) to help the search engine understand what the image is about. It’s also a good idea because if someone uses a screen reader or other assistive technology, it will read this aloud.
This post will explain how to use alt text so that you can optimize your images and make them more accessible for everyone.
Alternative text, or alt text, is an HTML attribute which describes the appearance of an image on a web page. You may have seen it before in your browser:
In this case, the alt text is “banana.” It’s what browsers show to people who can’t see the picture.
The alt text can be whatever you want it to be — but it’s also important for SEO. Here’s why.
What Is Alt Text?
Alt text is an HTML attribute that defines a description for an image. It’s not visible to users, but search engines like Google use it to crawl a page and index its content.
Alt text, also called alternative text or alt attribute, is a textual representation of an image on a webpage. The purpose of alt text is to provide a meaningful description of the image for people who can’t see the image for one reason or another (e.g., because they are using a screen reader).
Alt text is not meant to be used as a substitute for an image; rather, it should be used in addition to an image. The alt attribute’s content conveys meaning about the image itself, so it must be accurate and relevant.
When writing alt text for SEO purposes, there are some guidelines that you need to follow:
Use keywords if they fit naturally into your description. You can increase your page’s search engine ranking by including relevant keywords in your alt texts. However, don’t overdo it and make sure that your description still makes sense without those keywords. Otherwise, Google may penalize your site for keyword stuffing
Keep each alt text as short as possible (50 characters or less). Longer descriptions won’t help Google understand what images are on your website but will only annoy users who can see them.
The alt attribute is the text alternative to an image. It provides an additional layer of information for users who cannot see the images in your website. As it’s a good practice to include descriptive text in your images, the alt attribute is used more often than you might think.
The alt attribute should not be empty. If you don’t provide any text, search engines will ignore your image and won’t use it in their search results.
Alt text instagram
If you’re an Instagram user, you’ve probably been asked to add some text to your photos. By default, the photo sharing platform does not display any text with your images, but it does provide a space for you to add some if you want.
This is part of a feature called “Instagram Stories,” which allows users to post series of photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. On top of that, there are also options for adding stickers and filters, making your posts even more fun.
While this feature is great for creating entertaining and engaging content, there’s one aspect that often gets overlooked: alt text. This is the image description that appears on screen when someone hovers over an image. It’s also used by search engines when they index pictures on the web and is therefore just as important as any other piece of metadata on your website or blog post.
If you’re posting pictures directly from Instagram to Facebook or Twitter (or vice versa), then there’s no need to worry about this because it automatically pulls in the alt text from Instagram — but what if you want to take things further? How can you go about finding out what your images are called so that you can create relevant descriptions?
Alt text vs image description
There are a lot of questions about alt text and image descriptions, so I thought I’d write a quick post to clear things up.
Alt text is the text you see in your browser tab when you hover over an image. It’s also used by screen readers for people with visual impairments. Image descriptions are different from alt tags because they are used by screen readers as a description of the image that is displayed below the title of your post (see example).
Alt text is not only for visually impaired users, it’s also important for search engine optimization (SEO), which means that if you aren’t using alt tags on your site, Google will have trouble reading it and indexing it properly.
Here are some tips on how to write good alt text:
Use keywords that describe what’s in the image (cats) or what might be coming up later in your article (spoiler alert).
Don’t repeat yourself — don’t use “image of” or “picture of” in every single one of your images because it gets repetitive very fast and makes it harder for search engines to understand what’s happening on your page.
Here are some useful tips on how to write alt text for SEO:
Use natural language
Search engines look at the text you put inside the alt attribute as if it were regular content. So, instead of using technical terms or short phrases that only make sense to humans, try describing what you see in an easy-to-understand way. This will help search engines understand what’s going on in your image and use it when showing search results related to that image.
Make sure all images have alt attributes
This is one of those things that many people forget but is quite important when it comes to SEO and visibility online: every image should have an alt attribute containing descriptive text to help visually impaired users better understand what they’re looking at (and also for Google and other search engines).