Ever been in a job where you seem to come across the same mistake or oversights seemingly daily? We do, and funnily enough it’s in a commonly known and relatively basic area of website development and search engine optimisation. We’re talking about missing Alt Tags. Almost everyday we review website(s) for the purpose of an SEO audit, and almost everyday we find the site(s) has loads of missing alt tags.
With this in mind, let us change our opening sentence from “same mistakes” to “same opportunities”. We say opportunities because adding alt tags to your pages, using appropriate and relevant keywords, is one of the easiest ways to give Google a signal that this page is relevant to that or those keywords. It’s probably the third easiest task, right behind changing your meta title and meta descriptions.
What Is An Alt Tag?
Some of you might be sitting there wondering what the hell an alt tag actually is. Well put really simply, it is “alternative text” which is to be displayed when an image can’t be displayed for whatever reason (read more on the topic). In our more modern times, there are fewer and fewer problems with images not displaying (less browser clashes, much faster internet etc etc)…however the alt tag as a tool in web development and SEO still exists.
How To Add An Alt Tag
Adding or editing alt tags is a relatively easy task if you are willing to dive into a little bit of code. Some CMS’s make this task really easy (such as WordPress), others not so easy. We think it’s best to grasp the basic HTML method just in case. Check out the example below:
<img src="example.jpg" alt="example keyword" />
As you can see, we have the basic img src code which tells the browser which image to display, followed by the alt tag. It really is as simple as editing this alt tag to an appropriate and relevant keyword and you are done. By doing so, you’ve added a keyword to your page, thus increasing keyword density.
So there you have it…next time you are adding or editing a page, give your site a little SEO boost by taking a minute to make sure each image has an appropriate alt tag.
Great Article guys