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Why ALT tags are important to SEO

Justin Aldridge

Hello! My name is Kayleigh and I’m new to Artemis. My background is in journalism and content writing, and I’m currently getting to grips with the mysterious world of SEO. I’ll be writing about the SEO concepts I learn about over time – I hope you’re as excited as I am!

The first piece of SEO jargon I’ll be exploring  is ALT tags. An ALT tag provides text information about images online. If an image doesn’t load on your webpage, we will see a short text description of that image instead. This can also be used for visually impaired visitors to the site so they can find out what is on the page through a program which reads out text.

ALT tags are picked up by Google and Bing, primarily in image-related searches. Makes sense, right? But the fact that ALT tags aren’t often seen doesn’t mean you can fill them to the brim with your SEO keywords. Make sure your ALT tag explains what the visitor should be seeing. If in doubt, think about what a visually impaired reader would need to know to understand the image. A string of keywords will tell them nothing.

Consistency is key when it comes to naming your images. Don’t use obscure terms and don’t spam your keywords with overuse of terms in your image names, or search engines will pick up on this and will suspect that something underhand is going on.

If your website is image-heavy, ALT tags will be especially important. If someone is conducting a Google Image search, it’ll help you immensely to get your ALT tags in order and to avoid overloading them with SEO terms.

If you want advice on how to make the most out of your ALT tags, get in touch and we’ll be happy to talk about how we can help.