Why Using Alt Tags Is Beneficial

Alt attributes, known as alt tags by almost everyone, are important to all e-Commerce merchants who want to serve visually impaired shoppers and give their SEO a boost at the same time.

E-commerce website owners should be using alt tags on every product image, even if it seems repetitious. Alt tags for images are for the visually impaired who are using a screen reader; tags should describe an image accurately, yet precisely, for someone who cannot see the image. If you are selling a dress and there is a model showing the front and another image with the model showing the back of the dress, you need two different alt tags. One should say "black cocktail dress front view" and "black cocktail dress showing the backless design." You do not have to say "image of" or "this is a picture of", nevertheless, it is it is very time consuming if you have a large product catalog.

Since search engine bots cannot read images, the alt text provides an additional opportunity to use keywords, but only if they are applicable. This is an SEO benefit, plus alt tags tell search engines which images to return for image searches. Using the example above, you would have an additional keyword phrase "black cocktail dress backless design" for SEO. Never keyword stuff alt tags, you will be penalized by Google just as you would if you stuffed your content with keywords.

To understand how to write short, descriptive alt tags, try accessing your website using Lynx, or any other free text-only browser. It is important to give the visually impaired text that is the equivalent of your image. Do your alt tags convey your image accurately? You cannot convey any extra text that the image does not show either. For example, you cannot use an alt tag that says "black dress, appropriate for evening events", save this for the product description.