Alt Tags: Should They Be Keyword Focused?

Search engines have improved over the years at recognizing images on website pages, but they still can’t “see” images the way we can, so it’s not wise to leave the interpretation to them. Here’s what you can do.

Automated Transcript:

Okay, so your second question is very related to this.

It’s you ask should alt tags, be keyword focused.

And would you is the any elaboration on that one?

I would think.

Yes, right, really well.

Okay, yeah, I mean in the short answer is yeah.

Your alt tags, should be include your keywords and in a similar vein to what we talked about with captions.

We want it to be useful and descriptive and not just crammed and keywords in there but I want to take a second just to make sure we all understand what an ALT tag is versus what in caption is.

Yeah, caption is usually text that appears underneath an image.

In alt tag is something written into the HTML so that when a spider looks at the image the alt tag says what this image is about.

 It’s also used for usability for if you are blind and you had a screen reader, it would read the alt tag rather than because it obviously the computer can’t describe the image.

So the alt tag is used to say this is an image of a man.

Handmade wooden retail displays.

This is not to be confused with the

The.

Image title, which some of you who use WordPress has seen before as well, which is another thing. You can add within the an image to describe the image.

22:32

typically browsers, if you hover over an image will show you, the image title will not show you the alt tag, but the caption appears beneath

22:48

Go ahead Trisha.

22:55

I’ll text her.

That’s one of his pet peeves.

Oh well, I’m gonna call Mickey wrong, and I’ll tag him on this video.

Technically, it is a tag within the HTML.

The, ah, I don’t I don’t, I heard it both ways and call it both ways, but I think that’s when I think that that’s one of his pet peeves, that I always hear hear.

That’s all right.

I like Mickey,

23:20

Anyway oh no I know he’s great. Yeah.

So so the alt tag is the question Tim’s asking yes in the same the same things true with captions as with alt tags.

Yeah describe what’s in the image using your alt tag thinking about the fact that you would be helping someone who is using a screen reader understand what the image is about.

So I don’t recommend just putting the keyboard retail display.

 As an alarm.

That’s it’s a big for accessibility settings.

I would be more descriptive and more unique.

 One of our happy employees.

Making them hand worked wouldn’t retail display.

And that ends up accomplishing all the purposes

We have the keyword in there.

For SEO, we have it. Helpful description for an ALT for a screen reader for a visually impaired person using screen reader.

The search engine understands what the image is about because search engines can’t read the image.

So yeah.

But again is this the most important SEO ranking Factor

No.

 But I’d say it’s more important than it used to be in that Google is trying to warn us that more and more people are using Google image search as a search engine these days than the traditional 10 Blue Link Google search engine.

So if you have an ALT tag that describes what you provide in, someone’s using the image search, you increase your, at your opportunity to be found as someone’s.

Google Images.

So retail displays might be a great example of that.

I’m searching for retail displays.

I might be using image search because I would like to see what these image.

These retail displays look like.

And if I have added retail display in a descriptive alt tag and that image appears with the article in a Google image, search.

I might have really found some great customers.

Yeah, I do a lot of image searches on Google

 All to just not necessarily for clients when I’m looking for stuff.

Yeah, I think it’s Google’s attempt because if we think about it Facebook as a search engine, it just works very different and it’s Google’s attempt to address.

The fact that we are visual people and sometimes we want to image result, not of text result.

Yeah, I mean the E search engine results have been filled with videos and images a lot lately, but image search

It’s part of it, great questions.