How You Can Use Images And Alt Text To Boost Your SEO Ranking

Search engines rank websites based on hundreds of factors. Things that website owners do to hopefully improve their websites' standings on search engines fits under the umbrella of search engine optimization, or SEO.

Images are an important part of websites. Seemingly every website we use today incorporates images, if not videos and GIFs, in a relevant way that adds value. In some cases, images don't load for web users. Further, visually-impaired web users obviously aren't able to look at images, making images absolutely not useful for web browsers who are fully blind, legally blind, partially blind, or simply have issues viewing things.

Alternative text, also called alt text, is used in place of images. It's intended to tell visually-impaired visitors what the images show.

Alt text, like so many other factors, has a bearing on how well websites rank on search engine results pages. Believe it or not, many websites' images have poor, incomplete, or no alternative text.

Many people wonder what the best way to use alt text is from a search engine optimization standpoint. Here are some things website owners should keep in mind.

Alt text is used for the above three reasons

As already mentioned, alt text is obviously important because it tells visitors about images if they fail to load. Alt text is also important because it keys visually-impaired visitors in about what images are meant to portray.

The third reason why alt text should matter to website owners is that search engines' algorithms take alt text into consideration.

Just use alt text for SEO?

Many website owners are only concerned with SEO for the utility it provides in optimizing websites' results on search engine results pages. However, this isn't a good idea, even if they're only concerned with SEO and not helping out visually-impaired or other visitors.

Aim to concisely explain images to visually-impaired visitors while incorporating at least one relevant, important keyword. It helps when keywords are used at the beginning of alt text, too.

The best way to figure out which alt text strategies are the most effective is to experiment with them yourself. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/etlgcy/whichisthebestwaytousealttext/.