Optimise Alt Text - SEO Tips
Alt text on images can help a great deal when ranking a web page in a search engine. Each image on your page can include a keyword phrase or two that relates to the image, it is important to make sure the text relates to the image, stuffing random text may look tacky and spammy. This text will also show up & help those that may surf the web with images turned off. The level of success will vary across all search engines.
How it should look:
<img src="search-engine.gif" width="10" height="10" alt="Alt text optimisation”">
Alt text can be added to any image on the page, for optimisation purposes, images that are used for style (rounded corners on tables etc) should not have any alt text, this also is recommended for usability compliance as screen readers will read out text on random parts of the screen confusing some people. When writing alt text a very short brief sentence should be used, no more than 5 words.
- Be sure to use the keyword phrases that you also used in the copy of your web page, the title tag of the page and the Meta tag.
- Do not try to cram a bunch of keywords into the "alt" attribute. We recommend using no more than 2 per image.
- Describe the image - do not just list keywords.
- The "alt" attribute is also a good place for misspellings and plural keyword phrases that you may not have used elsewhere.
- Linked images must have descriptive alt text.
- If possible images themselves should have a descriptive name, this can add to the keyword density of a page. If you do use keyphrases for image name then only use one per image.