Why is Alt text important for website SEO?

Here at Pumpkin Web Design, we are Preston’s leading web design and content marketing professionals. We provide valuable web design, SEO, and marketing solutions to a range of clients, across the North West, including Southport and Wigan, as well as Manchester. And this is our guide to everything you should know about Alt text and how this can be used to improve website SEO.

What is Alt text?

Alt text is short for alternative text and this is text used to describe an image. This is actually written as a piece of HTML that fits into the code of your website, and as such, this text tag is able to describe the image not just to a person using your website, but also to any search engines crawl bots that will be accessing your website.

What is Alt text used for?

Alt text was originally used to describe the images on your website in case these images didn’t load. At the beginning of the Internet era it was entirely possible for images to be too large or heavy to load and so the alt text would be displayed to show website users what the missing piece of content should be. With the increase in image optimisation for Web, and high quality image compression, as well as so called “lazy loading”, this is unlikely to be an issue with modern and well designed website images. So why is this still important? Well this Alt text serves other purposes too, including:

• Making your website more accessible- one of the main reasons why Alt text is still so important is because this will be used for people using a screen reader. For people with sight impairments a screen reader will read the content of your website out loud and slow good alt text will describe any images and visual elements to ensure that all of your potential customers and clients have a positive user experience.
• Improving website SEO- the second reason to include good and effective alt tags is to improve the SEO. As this text will be read and understood by search engine toils, this simple HTML tag can have a positive impact on your websites SEO.

Why is Alt text important for website SEO?

So how does Alt text have an impact on website SEO? Well, as part of your on page SEO, Alt text can help your website rank more highly, and for a wider range of keywords, as this actually counts as a ranking factor for Google image searches.
Google image searches can be a fantastic tool for companies and businesses to use to attract more organic traffic, although this is often overlooked. For companies in particular niches and industries many potential customers or clients may even begin their search with an image search, and ranking highly here can direct these customers directly to your website, where you can then convert them to paying customers.

For help or advice with any aspect of web marketing and SEO, why not ask the professionals today, here at Pumpkin Web Design?