Alt Tag, What is AltText? What does it do?

In this blog post, we will look at the differences between the image alt tag, the image title text and the name of the image file and give you some suggestions on how to optimize them.

Alt Tag, Alt Text?

When you think of image alt text, the term that comes to mind is “alt tag”. The so-called “alt tag” is a misnomer because “alt text” or “alt text” is an alternative text attribute of the image tag. There is this confusion in the SEO world, and everyone has a different understanding in their minds when these concepts are mentioned.

Alternative text is used to decipher what the image is about, for example by screen readers for the visually impaired. Therefore, according to the 3C Accessibility Guidelines, for code to be considered valid by W3C, it is necessary to include both image alt text and image title text for important images on the page. For non-trivial design-based images, empty alt text properties can be used. In this case, screen readers will skip the picture.

"Image Alt Text" What is it?

Alt text or alternative text is used to describe an image as “alternative”.

The primary purpose of the alt text is therefore to make images more accessible to screen reader users in order to make the web more accessible according to W3C accessibility guidelines. As a rule, the alt text should include targeted keyword optimization in a context that explains what the image is about. If no alternative text is available for the image, the content will be shown as a blank image. Image alt text is the text displayed in place of a blank image. Since Google cannot crawl images in depth and often cannot fully crawl text, it focuses on the alternative text when trying to understand what the image is.

It is important to note the W3C’s Accessibility Guidelines for Alternative Text:

When using img (image), specify a short text alternative with the alt attribute. Note The value of this property is called “alt text”.
When an image contains words that are important for understanding the content, the alt text should also contain these words. This makes the alt text function the same as the image on the page. Note that it does not necessarily describe the visual characteristics of the image, but it should have the same meaning as the image.

"Image Title Text" What is it?

The Image caption text property is a property used to provide additional information about the image. In this case, since the image title is not used for search ranking, optimizing it is not considered that important.

But if you are obsessed with SEO and want to optimize everything for W3C optimization, by all means, add both alt and title text for your images.

User Intent and User Experience should be the Main Focus of your Optimizations

Over the past 10 years, not much has changed in terms of optimization for alt text and title features.

When optimizing both of these features, you need to focus not only on keyword targeting but also on user intent.

This should be the primary ideal you should strive for in this optimization process. Don’t change keyword pages and of course your keywords when appropriate.

Pay Attention to User Experience

To increase the visibility of your content on Google Images, create pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

Here are a few important tips on this topic:

Providing good content: Your visual content should be relevant to the topic of the page.

Optimizing placement: Place images next to relevant text whenever possible.

Don’t place important text inside images: Avoid placing text inside images, especially important text elements such as page titles and menu items, because not all users will have access to them and page translation tools won’t work on images, so you’ll be stuck with a narrower audience. Keep text in HTML, provide alt text for images to ensure maximum accessibility to your content.

Create informative and quality sites: Good content on your webpage was as important to Google Images as visual content. Page content can be used to create a text snippet for the image, and Google takes page content quality into account when ranking images.

Alt Tag, What is Alt Text? and What Does It Do?

Alt Tag, Alt Text?

"Image Alt Text" What is it?

"Image Title Text" What is it?

User Intent and User Experience should be the Main Focus of your Optimizations

Pay Attention to User Experience