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Alt-tags can be a huge boost to SEO, but before you decide whether or not to put them on your site, you first must understand what they are and why they’re beneficial.

What are they?

An alt-tag (or “alt text”) is exactly what it sounds like – a tag entered into HTML that denotes the “alternative” text that should appear if the element in question doesn’t render properly. These elements include both images and videos. While not as visually pleasing as an actual image, alt-tags ensure that the meaning behind your picture isn’t completely lost.
 

Why is this important?

Alt-tags are more than just helpful to customers who can’t view images; they’re also crucial for SEO. The words contained within an alt-tag make excellent snacks for hungry search engine spiders. When spiders crawl your website in search of information to index, they are limited to archiving words alone. Sadly, images and videos are unreadable to these spiders…unless you’ve thought ahead and used alt-tags. In addition, only images with alt-tags can be indexed by Google Images, so adding alt-tags to your images gives your website another way to be found beyond just regular Google web search. This could prove to be a potential boost to search engine traffic.

Don’t keyword stuff As with regular page keywords, keep in mind that it’s important not to ’keyword-stuff” your alt-tags. A nonsensical alt-tag of “flowers foliage flower decoration design floral florist” rather than just “flowers” is actually detrimental to your efforts. Better still would be the alt-tag “yellow, orange, and red flowers,” since it is descriptive and tells Google what your image is about. There are other image optimization tricks you can use for SEO.  Spiders are fans of appropriate file names, since they tell both the search engine and the user exactly what it is that they’re looking at.  An image titled IMG0345.jpg is much less likely to be indexed correctly by Google than one titled “bright-color-flowers.jpg”.  Correct indexing means a search engine boost – unintelligible images mean that your site may get docked for spam or worse.

Got the hang of it? Go ahead and implement these practices and see if you notice any change in your search traffic. Even if the change isn’t noticeable at first (and remember, search engines can take up to a year to index changes), your current customers will certainly appreciate it – attention devoted to images and aesthetics is attention ultimately devoted to the quality of your site and the care of your customers.