Optimizing Alt Text and Image SEO in WordPress | Coalition (2023)

FAQs

Optimizing Alt Text and Image SEO in WordPress | Coalition? ›

Keywords should be chosen carefully and used sparingly. This will ensure that alt text readers get the main message. It also helps categorize the page content for web searches. Stuffing as many keywords as you can think of in an alt text description will backfire.

Keywords should be chosen carefully and used sparingly. This will ensure that alt text readers get the main message. It also helps categorize the page content for web searches. Stuffing as many keywords as you can think of in an alt text description will backfire.

Fundamentally, the purpose of alt text is to improve accessibility by describing what an image is showing to visitors who do not have the ability to see them. However, it also helps search engine crawlers and so improves SEO.

This makes images a powerful way to get more SEO traffic. And Google reads alt text to help understand what images are about. Without alt text, your images are much less likely to rank on Google Images. So optimizing your image alt text can lead to more traffic from both Google and Google Images.

If you're unable to see alt tags in your HTML code, re-insert the image onto the page and empty your website's cache. WordPress cannot add the new alt tag, and you need to overwrite the existing empty one manually. After that, clean your site cache to ensure you see the freshest content.

Don't use images as text.

This is less of an alt text-specific best practice and more of a general SEO-friendly web development tenet. Because search engines can't read text within your images, you should avoid using images in place of words.

Keyword stuffing is a confirmed negative ranking factor. Attempting to manipulate search rankings with repeated uses of words or phrases will only cause a site to rank lower in Google's search results.

Is alt text a Google ranking factor? ›

Google's use of alt text as a ranking factor is limited to image search. For web search, alt text is treated as regular on-page text.

Use supported image formats

Google Images supports images in the following formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG. It's also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the file type.

JPEGs are usually more SEO-friendly than PNGs, especially if you do not need transparent backgrounds, as they offer better compression levels.

Including alt text for decorative images or items

Decorative items such as dividers or design items that don't provide additional context or content don't need alt text. They don't add to the information a user needs and they make little sense, or are unnecessary, when read with a screen reader.

Alternative (Alt) Text is meant to convey the “why” of the image as it relates to the content of a document or webpage. It is read aloud to users by screen reader software, and it is indexed by search engines. It also displays on the page if the image fails to load, as in this example of a missing image.

Recently, Google's John Mueller confirmed that bolding important pieces of text in your content can help your SEO performance, as it allows Google to better understand your content.

Essentially, alt text should be as long as it needs to be in order to effectively describe the content, but should be succinct. For complex images such as charts, graphs, and diagrams that require more lengthy descriptions, there are other options.

The alt text needs to describe the image as concisely as possible. As a rule of thumb: avoid writing text alternatives longer than 100 characters. Having long alt text will result in a poor user experience for those using screen readers.

Hidden text is content visible to computers and search engines but not to the visitors of a website. This invisible text lurks in the background, in the website structure or design, and can negatively or positively impact your SEO.

Alt text should describe the content and purpose of the video. Ideally, a video should contain a second audio track with a description of the video elements that are purely visual and not accessible to people with a visual disability.

Is alt text better than image description? ›

An image description gives more details than alt text and allows someone to learn more about what is in an image that goes beyond alt text. Alt text gives the user the most important information while image descriptions provide further detail.

If you use the same alt text for all images, Google will most likely only notice one image because they aren't unique. Which might be fine depending on the images. The image alt text also is a big factor in Google's Image Search so the closer you can get to what customers would search for, the better.

Put simply, WordPress automatically resizes images to help you save bandwidth and prevent you from having to manually resize images. For example, the image size you would use for a post thumbnail is much different than what you would use for an image slider on your home page.

By default, WordPress compresses your images at about 82% quality to improve site performance for mobile users. If that causes your problems, you can disable image compression or lower it a bit more. Resize the default thumbnail size and regenerate them using a plugin like Regenerate Thumbnails or Simple Image Sizes.

The alt text and title of your image are both attributes in the code that the browser reads. However, each of these attributes has a distinct purpose: The image alt text is a web accessibility tool. The image title provides additional information about an image.

That being said, the image title is not used for search ranking, so it is not quite as important to optimize for. But if you're an obsessive SEO completionist and want to optimize everything for the best in W3C optimization, by all means, do include both the alt text and title text for your image.

What Is the Difference Between Alt Text vs Caption. The alt text is used to describe the image for search engines and screen readers. On the other hand, the caption is used to describe the image for all users. Alt text is not visible on your website while captions are visible below your images.

Keyword Stuffing

Using a high density of keywords in your content can look like you are keyword stuffing, which will likely result in a penalty from Google and a drop in rankings. Instead, choose to use your keywords naturally throughout the article and avoid putting them all together as one massive block of text.

The most common SEO stop words are pronouns, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. This includes words like a, an, the, and, it, for, or, but, in, my, your, our, and their.

What should I avoid with SEO? ›

Generally speaking, many SEO professionals agree that a keyword should not appear more than once per 200 words of copy. This means that for every 200 words of copy on a webpage, a given keyword should not appear more than once.

The short answer to this question is no. WordPress tags do not offer any real SEO benefit, and in fact, using them excessively can clutter your website, create a poor user experience, and even have a negative impact on the SEO of your website as a whole.

How many keywords are too many? The ideal keyword density preferred by both readers and search engines is around two to five percent. Even in longer pieces, the best practice is not to exceed 20 uses per webpage.

This is a typical experience for someone who is blind or visually impaired. Alt Text is an invisible description of a photo that a screen reader can read out loud with audio to people who are blind or visually impaired. Most social media platforms have an option to edit a photo and add alt text.

We do recommend optimizing your images prior to uploading them. However, if that's not possible, or you want to optimize the images that are already on your site, you can still do that.

What size should images be for SEO Wordpress? ›

Optimize Image Size and Quality

Uploading large images to your website can make your site sluggish. Make sure your site loads quickly by optimizing the size of your images. Generally, images should be smaller than 100 kb and resized to the size you want them displayed. We like this plugin to help resize images quickly.

So for SEO, you need a minimum of a 16px font to make sure your site is considered mobile friendly, which is crucial in the mobile-first index.

So if you care about your site performance (and, in turn, its SEO), you need to control the size of your images. Lowering file sizes while maintaining acceptable quality is the primary goal of optimizing images for website performance. Smaller files lead to faster page loads and improved user-experience & SEO.

Optimizing your images helps to ensure a better user experience and that you meet users' expectations. SEO - Image optimization will help to ensure that your images rank in image searches on Google, and it will also be beneficial to the overall SEO (search engine optimization) of your website.

WebP is the best for SEO because it will make your webpage and your images load faster on your website and Google, it prioritizes websites that load faster which means this will boost your search engine ranking. Having speed is important to be able to enhance your SEO performance and WebP does just that.

It's advisable to keep alt text at around 125 characters or less. It was previously advised that popular screen readers cut alt text off after around 125 characters. While no longer a hard and fast rule, it is still a good guide for content creators and SEOs.

The alt text needs to describe the image as concisely as possible. As a rule of thumb: avoid writing text alternatives longer than 100 characters. Having long alt text will result in a poor user experience for those using screen readers.

Essentially, alt text should be as long as it needs to be in order to effectively describe the content, but should be succinct. For complex images such as charts, graphs, and diagrams that require more lengthy descriptions, there are other options.

What Is Alt Text? Alt text (or alternative text) is a written description of an image. SEOs sometimes refer to alt text as “alt attributes” or “alt tags.” Optimized alt text is crucial in getting Google to rank your images on Google Images. That's because alt text lets you tell Google what the image shows.

Alt text should: be around 125 characters (15 to 20 words) – it can be longer if needed, but if it is too detailed then include some content in the main text instead. be no more than one sentence. include a full stop at the end.

How many times should I mention keywords for SEO? ›

Generally speaking, many SEO professionals agree that a keyword should not appear more than once per 200 words of copy. This means that for every 200 words of copy on a webpage, a given keyword should not appear more than once.

As Google recommends in its Advanced SEO resource, “Large images need to be at least 1200 px wide and enabled by the max-image-preview:large setting, or by using AMP.” Do not use your logo as the image.