Have you ever wondered how the images show up when you run a Google Image search? How is it that you can search for images of, say, whiskey shot glasses—and you get hundreds of images of shot glasses in your search results?! Is it Google magic? Nope. Just a Google best practice. Those images have been optimized for SEO.

How Search Engines “Read” Images

The spiders and bots that search engines use to crawl the internet cannot look at your photos or watch your videos. They can only see or “read” the text that is attached to those images. This descriptive copy is called alternative text, also known as “alt text.” If you want your images to be discovered by search engine bots, you need to add alt text to them. If you don’t add alt text, Google doesn’t “see” them and won’t include them in search results.

How to Optimize your Images

You can add your own alt text to your images. This will provide the  information search engines need to match search queries with relevant search results. The alt text you provide should describe the image accurately. It should also incorporate the keywords you are using on the page or site. Add high quality descriptions to add more value to each image.

To Keep in Mind

Assistive technology, such as screen readers, also use alt text to read aloud and describe the media on your website. Rich, descriptive alt tags will improve visitor’s experiences on your site. Unfortunately, some visual site elements, such as background images, slideshow backgrounds, and column backgrounds cannot have alt text added. You don’t want to add alt text to every visual image on your site (such as social icons and decorative background images) anyways. Only add alt text to the most relevant images on your website.

When you add alt text to the important images on your site to give your SEO a boost, not only are you increasing the likelihood of turning up in search results, you’re improving your site’s accessibility—making sure that all visitors to your site can navigate it easily.

WebWiskee website builder will help you make sure your images are optimized for both SEO and ADA compliance. Our Setup Wizard gives you a shopping list of the ingredients you need to build your site right, from branding to layout to design. We make the technical part easy for you, too, helping you get a handle on important stuff like SEO, copyright, and ADA compliance. Get on the waitlist!