Keeping your website at the highest SEO standard involves knowing all of the little things you can be doing to improve your website’s rankings. Alt Text – or alternative text – might seem like a small detail to add to the images on your website. However, its importance to your website’s ranking cannot be stressed enough. So, what is alt text, and why is it important to include on all of your images for SEO optimization? Read on to find out!
What Is Alt Text?
When you upload an image to a website, you probably already know that including the proper titles and tags with it is a good practice. After all, it’s another way you can rank for keywords! Alt-text is another crucial component that you should be adding to your images.
Sometimes, your images might not always load properly on your website. The role of alt text is to tell Google – and the users on your site – what exactly an image contains if it can’t properly load. This also helps with your website’s accessibility; people with disabilities that may not be able to make out the image will know exactly what it contains.
Alt text is something you add to an image yourself when you upload it to your website. In order for it to achieve the desired effect, you should describe the image as if you were looking at it and explaining the details to someone who isn’t. As long as you don’t add details that are irrelevant to the image, you’ll be adding alt text properly.
Why Is It Important?
While it might be considered a smaller detail, adding alt text to your images is much more important than meets the eye. As previously mentioned, alt text improves your website’s accessibility by making certain that everyone can interact with an image. Because it’s an accessibility enhancer, adding alt text is also required to keep your website ADA compliant.
You should know that websites that aren’t compliant with ADA regulations can be penalized by Google’s search algorithm. Getting a penalty isn’t an easy thing to bounce back from, so you should keep your website compliant to avoid this!
Alt-text is also helpful for improving your search rankings, and can be utilized for that purpose. For example, if you’re writing a blog about the best recipes that use parmesan cheese, you can add an image of it. In the alt text for that image, you can include important keywords related to parmesan cheese. This helps with improving your search rankings in image search.
Improve Your Search Rankings With Boston Web Marketing
When it comes to making your website ADA compliant, Boston Web Marketing has the tools you need to make that happen. ADA rules can change at a moment’s notice, so we’re always on top of the changes to make sure that your website stays compliant! Our team will help your website rise in Google’s algorithm rankings, getting more traffic and the conversions you need. To get the most out of SEO, contact us today!