Why you should care with the image ALT attribute
I notice significant traffic drop from the search engines (mainly Google) lately. I’m not an SEO expert but I can certainly tell if something goes wrong! I’m focusing on my next few weeks to dig this problem deeper.
One of the problems that I found has something to do with the ALT (alternate text) attribute on your images. That’s basically what people will see when they can’t see or render the image. It will also be used as keywords when people are searching for images on Google.
However, I’ve found something interesting with how Google uses the alternate text for something more.
One of my posts about the MSN Onion Head Emoticons has given me quite a lot of hits for the past 6 months. Until recently, I notice that there are not so many visitors to the post anymore.
So I tried searching for it in Google by typing “onion head emoticons” as the keywords, and I was shocked to see that my blog’s post was ranked #9!
Curious, I’ve decided to analyze the first result that came out to find out what it has that my blog has not.
If you look at the result closely, there are so many occurrences of “Onion emoticons” as keywords coming up on the result page:
So I was wondering whether this guy (or girl) is trying to “cheat” Google by stuffing keywords somewhere on the page. I opened the page and peeped (heh heh) at its HTML source. I found out that these keywords are actually part of the Image ALT attributes!
A "legal" but smart way to add keywords on your post
I also realized that I had my search engines traffic decreased after I upgraded to WordPress 2.6. I remembered that the WordPress developers made a change to the way it handles alternate text. Previously, by entering the Title of the image, WordPress will produce the same alternate text of the image. Since WordPress 2.6, however, you have to insert the alternate text on a different input field yourself. This made all my old alternate texts obsolete!
So I double checked my images on the Onion Head Emoticon post. Found out that all images have alternate texts such as “img249.gif”, “img241.gif”, and so on, Grrr!
This proves how important the alternate text is on your images! I think for the next few days or so, I’ll slowly edit my popular posts one by one and make sure that every image has a good alternate text on them. You should do the same too if you are serious in getting some search engines traffic.
I thought that the alternate text will only be used by Google if you are searching images. Apparently, it’s also being used for searching texts? Have you found out about this before? Any comments from you regarding this will be much appreciated.
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Michael — do you use the SEO friendly image plugin? That might help alleviate your issues with alt text on images.
I’ll have to take a look at mine to see what they’re showing. I usually do change the name from the file name to something more meaningful.
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Michael while using ALT text for images is important that may not be the only reason why your page slipped…another possible reason besides some good SEO work that the site did is that it is a Wordpress.com-hosted blog. It could be leveraging from the strength of the Wordpress domain itself?
I always do this and as you mentioned. I get lot of traffic because of alt text. In july out of whole traffic 75.87% visits is from search engines
@Margaret: I already gave that a try, but it forces all images to have the post title as the alt text.. wish there’s a plug-in where you can easily tag all of your images on one screen like the SEO Title Tag plug-in
@Arnold: It’s possible. I guess I need to more SEO work on my posts from now on
Thanks for the insight
@Nihar: Yeah, I envy you Nihar. Believe me, visitors from search engines are much more worth it than social bookmarking traffic
Good point Michael and Arnold. Thanks for the info about WP 2.6 image posting as well. Have to keep an eye on that issue if or when I upgrade from 2.5.
Er, I use the complete html code from my Flickr account instead of insert url and the image name in wordpress. So, I suppose nothing is affected (?)
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It’s your lucky day michael…….
Check this http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-friendly-images
But i’m not sure if working fine for 2.6, i used it for previous version of WP. But manually set your image tag is trully the best way to improved your SEO.
Lots of food for thought here. I for one, will have to pay more attention to this side of things. I do think that this effort will be worthwhile as I would love to increase the visitors from search engines on my site.
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Thank for the heads Up on this one michael. I need to do some tweaking
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Michael,
But on referring sites and social bookmarking front i have to do something. my traffic is too low from that side.
Nihars last blog post..July 2008 Statistics
I originally came to your site to leave a drop from entrecard and saw this post. Thank you so much for this information. I saw something about how I should edit my alt tags for SEO a few weeks ago but I never did because I wanted to know WHY. I don’t like to do things unless I have a good reason why!
I am going to go ahead and do the same as you — edit images in my more popular posts. Furthermore, I am going to add images to posts that don’t have them.
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Also, there is a great tool for telling the number of images on your site that don’t have ALT tags. Send along a message if you’d like mt to give you the site name. It’s bookmarked on my laptop which isn’t readily accessible at the mo’
An American in Frances last blog post..Busted! Common Myths About the French
Good point. I haven’t really paid much attention to the image ALT but then I haven’t really used much of image on my post either.
Yan
THANKS for this. I wasn’t really paying attention to this and now, checking my previous posts, I realize that these were all missing on my posts indeed. Looks like it’s going to be a busy afternoon putting ALT texts!
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Hmmn, thanks for the tips. I don’t know SEO either and I think this is another lesson learned for me.
Alt tags is vey important! And when you blog with wordpress 2.6, it much more easy for use to enter alt attributes on images.
Alt tags are very important, especially in sites that use graphics heavily. Always use a keyword rich name for the image and alt text as well. It’s very useful for Google’s image search.
Michael, I am happy and yet sad at the same time to read this post.
It means I also have to go into each of my posts and alter the alt text. My weekend is burned.
Looks like most of us have to re-edit our posts to add the ALT attributes
I’ve tried that SEO Friendly Images plug-in before. Though it is good for SEO purposes, it’s bad for your readers (because all ALT attributes will be the same as your post title!)
I came to know about this last month. But I knew his before that and never implemented it. Last month after changing to a new domain I am trying every way to get search engine traffic. This was one of the method I started using.
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I was too lazy to input any alt field in every image I put.. :))
thanks anyway for the information, will use it one day
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Oh yeah, I knew this handy little thing back when I was first starting to learn HTML via this website: http://www.html.net. It was really simple, for beginners - but that’s what made it perfect. On top of all that, it didn’t just say put at the top - it explained everything why you should do it and how it works. Great website.
So yeah, the ALT attribute really is supposed to be important, and I’m glad you’re blogging it to let other people know. Of course, the ALT attribute is pretty handy for people for whom images actually don’t show up - but for other purposes, tags are definitely the reason.
The only thing I don’t get is how can your images have any ALT text at all if you didn’t put it yourself - does your blog just take the title of the image and makes it the ALT text as well? Well - that’s just another reason why some people build their websites from plain HTML instead of FrontPage or Dreamweaver…
[...] Indeed images speak a thousand words but Search Engine Spiders don’t read images, they only read the <alt> tag which is the textual description of the image. Hence, it is important to always provide a meaningful description of an image with your keyword within the <alt> tag. Why you should care with the image ALT attribute. [...]
This is a very informative post for me as I am presently focussing on improving the keywords in my image alt attributes with respect to anchor text.
Everything that I have read recently confirms what you are saying - namely, that it is very important to do this properly.
Glad that the post helps! I know how lazy we are sometimes to do these simple things!