ALT Attribute – What is the ALT attribute?

The ALT attribute, also known as alt text, is an attribute that is placed inside the HTML image tags of our website. The value that we enter within this attribute will be the text that will be displayed instead of the image in case an error occurs while loading the image. It also provides information about the image to people with reduced accessibility and to search engines, which use this tag to extract information about the image.   

 

 

 

 

Where to find the ALT attribute

 

The ALT attribute is normally not visible if the image it is on is displaying correctly in the user’s browser. However, for the opposite case where the image is not seen, it is really useful.    

If you need to check what the ALT attribute is on images that are being displayed in the browser, you can easily do so by right-clicking on the image and selecting the inspect option. You can also install a Chrome extension such as Web Developer with which you can easily see the ALT attribute of images on any web page.    

What is the ALT attribute for?

 

Sometimes, due to browser incompatibilities, link failures or security reasons, the images that appear on your website cannot be shown to users who visit it. Given these problems, in order not to harm the user experience too much, the ALT attribute will show an alternative text to the image, which will guide the user by indicating the content in the image that cannot be displayed.  

The ALT attribute also helps the accessibility of your website, facilitating navigation for users with visual diversity who visit it, since reading applications recognize it and read it, being able to indicate what the image contains to users who cannot see it. .  

In addition, the ALT attribute will also  help improve the SEO positioning  of your website, since it is recognized by Google robots and used as information to calculate the relevance of the website’s content.

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Importance of the ALT attribute for SEO

 

The ALT attributes of images are an element that directly affects the SEO positioning of a website.    This is because Google’s crawling robots do not yet have the ability to recognize the content of images on a page, so they look for information about the image content in the ALT attribute.

ALT attribute optimization

 

If you need to optimize the ALT attribute of images on your website, here are some tips you can follow:  

  • It is recommended that all images on the website have the ALT attribute.

  • The content of the ALT attribute should try to put the image in context with a short phrase.

  • In decorative images, you can leave the ALT attribute blank, although it is considered good practice to give them an ALT that indicates where they are located and their function, in the style of CSS classes.

  • The keywords of the page can be included in the ALT attribute, but they must serve to explain the context or content of the image and avoid over-optimization or keyword stuffing