SEIntelligence : Alt Text

November 15th, 2011

SEIntelligence also makes it incredibly easy to add alternative text, or alt text, to your website images. Watch the following video to learn more about alt text, and how you can easily implement it on your website through SEIntelligence.

Video Transcript:

A picture may say a thousand words, but to search engines it doesn’t say much. Because of this, and a few other reasons, the alt attribute exists. On the Images tab, you will see the Alt Text and Image columns. Under the image column, you will see the file name of your images. If you click on each of them, you should be able to see previews for your images.

So why do we create alt text. As stated earlier, search engines are not really able to see an image the same way a human is able to. For search engines, the alt text can be a helpful way to understand what an image is. The alt text is also helpful when an image does not show up in a browser. This might happen when the image doesn’t load properly, or the user is using a non-visual web browser. In it’s place, the alt text will typically appear.

To add, or change your alt text, click in the alt text area and type your alt text. Your alt text is almost like a brief sentence, or a few words describing your image. Avoid using one word descriptions, but also avoid writing excessively long sentences.

Be brief, and to the point, while trying to include high quality key-terms that users would actually search.

For example, this image shows a set of men’s left handed golf clubs. This is exactly what I will type in. It contains good keywords, and describes the image perfectly. It wouldn’t be enough if I typed in golf clubs as that doesn’t really describe the photo well. It would be too much if I typed in left handed golf clubs that are nice and shiny and super expensive to buy.

When you type your alt text, it can be exactly like you see here. Almost like you are writing a sentence. No hyphens or commas are needed to separate the words.


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