For my project in SEO, there are obviously a lot of pictures on my site. I am a visual person, not a read-to-understand person, so I am very drawn to pictures and images. You know what’s not a visual learner? The bot that crawls my website. That is why alt text is important.
As defined by the blog, “Image Alt Text: What It Is, How to Write it, and Why it Matters to SEO,” alt text is “the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user’s screen. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website.” The three reasons listed for why alt text is important are “accessibility, user experience, and image traffic.” Alt text helps your site to be more accessible for people with certain disabilities. It can help the user experience if the image doesn’t load by showing a description of what the image is. Finally, alt text helps to “surface your images in search results[…]”
3 Responses
Alt text is awesome. At the end of the day it helps the user search for the content they want through the use of pictures.
I don’t think people talk about alt text enough. This was great and fairly informational. I am a little confused on what happened in the last sentence though.
I love this post. I laughed at the part about the bot who crawls your website. Alt text ca be so helpful in so many ways.