At one time not all computers were capable of displaying images, hence the reason for alt tags. Web designers could put explanatory text in place of the image enabling visitors to understand the message behind the image. Now, most computers are designed to display images, which gives image alt tags a whole new purpose.
This is now a prime real estate spot that a web designer can take advantage of to boost the page optimization in the search engines. A web designer can enrich these images by placing the keywords you want to rank for in the HTML text of that image.
Increases Traffic
You can see the end result of your image alt tag when you hover over an image and text appears in a popup box. Your image alt text will help your website to be found when users type keywords into the search engine and choose, ‘view images only’. The keyword related images on your web site will appear by way of the keyword alt text. This gives you the opportunity of increased traffic because a visitor can click on your image and be taken to your website.
Visually impaired Internet browsers use software that reads the web page text aloud to them. Having alt text behind your images allows the visually impaired to have a better understanding of your web page. Blind people are consumers as well, and you would be losing that additional traffic without alt text on your images.
Higher SEO Rankings
When a search engine spiders your site, it can only read text. If there is no text added to your image the search engine will see nothing. However, by adding alt text to your image the spider will read the text content and determine the relevancy of that text to the rest of the content on your web page. This is where you can take advantage by putting related keywords to your web content and rank higher in the search engines for that keyword.
You can also use the alt text to link to other pages on your website. This creates internal linking throughout your web pages which the search engines love, and they will reward you with higher rankings.
Safety Rules
As a web designer, when you are creating image alt text, make sure you only use one phrase per image and each image should have a unique phrase. You will be penalized by the search engines for using multiple phrases for several images. This would be considered keyword stuffing.
Don’t overlook this step when designing a website. Your web traffic and SEO rankings will suffer for it. It is a small feature to add that has vast benefits to the success of your business.
Source: learnwebdevelopment.com/
