11 Image Alt Text

When you upload an image to your website you’ve probably seen fields for Alt Text and Title Text.

Why Alt Text and Title Text fields matter for SEO

Visually-impaired site visitors use screen readers. As the page is read, images obviously need some text to go along with them for the reader to read. Otherwise it won’t know what the heck the image is.

The Alt Text is “alternative text” which tells screen readers and search engines what the image is of within the context of the page.

Basically, take two seconds and fill out the Alt Text and describe the image and what it has to do with your content. If someone were reading the page to you and read the Alt Text for the image, would it make sense?

For example, if you are a health and fitness coach and want to use this picture of a dog…your alt text could be “dog skeptical about fitness programs.” So let’s see if this works?

If the page is all about answering questions about fitness, then would this image fit if someone read the alt text to you? It sure does! You can imagine there is a picture of a dog with an adorable skeptical look.

How would a search engine “look” at the image? It would index it under “skeptical dog” and probably “skeptical about fitness programs” which works!

You’ll want to fill out Alt Text for pretty much every image you load into your site. If it’s an icon or some meaningless background image then you can leave it blank.

Really all you need to know is to fill out Alt Text to explain what the image is and what it has to do with that page.

For Title Text…if you’ve ever moused over an image you might see a little text pop-up. That’s the Title Text. This doesn’t do a whole lot. You can leave this blank unless it would be relevant information such as “learn more about our fitness programs” if clicking on the image would take the visitor to another page to, in fact, learn more.

That wraps it up for our SEO focus on images.