What is an Image Alt Tag?
Search engines have very basic scripts which gather information about websites, and unlike the human eye, these scripts are unable to understand the difference between the various images on your website. To give them a helping hand, we can add an “image alt tag” to every image on your site meaning that the search engines can still get information and understanding about the content of your pages. The added advantage of this is that if for any reason your image fails to display properly, your human visitors will still see the image alt tag you have added so that the page makes some kind of sense.
Image Alt Tag – Whats an Image Title Then?
The image alt tag is designed to provide information to humans if your image should fail to load, as well as providing additional information to search engine robots. An image title is an additional tag that can be added which will show to human visitors when they hover their mouse over your images. The title will also be read by search engines, but the image alt tag is the primary focus when it comes to SEO.
Do I need to add content to every image alt tag?
It is not essential to add image alt tags to every single image on your website, but every image that doesn’t have one is a missed opportunity to add search engine friendly content to your SEO strategy. A word of caution though – don’t be tempted to “keyword stuff” (or in other words overload your page with the same phrase or keyword over and over, or to add in keywords which aren’t relevant to your actual content). As the search engines will read your image alt tag as plain text, overloading your site with irrelevant content or mass repeating words will have a detrimental effect on your SEO efforts.
To add an image alt tag yourself, you will need to look for the following within your html markup:
<img src="image.jpg"/>
and amend it to look like this:
<img alt="alternative text in here" src="image.jpg"/>
and if you also want to add a title tag then you can change it to
<img alt="alternative text in here" title="image title in here" src="image.jpg"/>
If you are asking us to conduct your onsite SEO or we are completing your SEO design then you dont need to worry about image alt tags for the moment, but if you are doing your own design then hopefully this article has helped. If however you are now looking at this and starting to panic, don’t worry, simply contact us and we will help you sort out your image alt tag in a jiffy.
