How do you write good Alt tags? Does it matter for SEO or just for accessibility?
Both. I have a Slack screenshot from Dreamforce that ranks because of alt text. It helps a lot with ranking.
alt="Shoe"
alt="Men's blue Adidas running shoes"
alt="Sales chart"
alt="Bar chart showing a 30% increase in sales in Q1 2024"
alt="Blue decorative border"
alt=""
(if it adds no informational value)alt="Logo"
alt="OpenAI logo"
alt="Health infographic"
Also, you can practice by entering your alt text into GPT and asking it for best practices and recommendations.
That is a great primer on alt texts Lia. It's said that point 4 is a myth. Write as short as possible, but as long as needed to describe the image.
Agree... but I find that when I have limits, it forces me to be more intentional with my word choices. Great call out.
Good point. But it should not be a restriction making the alt text unusable. Alt texts for graphs, infographics etc will often need more characters.
It is also good practise to not repeat information already in the text surrounding the image like captions. Users of screen readers already read the text, and just want to know what the image is about. Repeating information in the alt text for SEO is ignoring the purpose of alt texts.
Just seeing these messages. Thank you for your input here.
So just to sum up one aspect, adding in keywords will be good for SEO?
Yes. Alt text boosts image SEO by giving search engines context for better indexing/ranking in image searches. File names are also a factor in image search. For organic search the alt text is treated like other text on the page (as per my knowledge).
You can also try this alt text GPT: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-Z0qjHKwvq-alt-text-english Just start by uploading an image.