Alt tags- what are they and why does it matter?

Alt tags stand for “alternative image tags”, and are critical to SEO. Here, briefly we’ll get into how, what and why. An alt tag, encoded in html it looks like <alt>image story text goes here</alt>. It tells google, or ahem yahoo, or some other guys, what that image means.

Much though they’d like you to believe it, they can’t read an image for meaning or context. They can read and process an alt tag, which is a description of an image. These images can then appear in organic searches, be it image search, or beside the relevant result for organic text search. Internet searchers like shiny objects- images, videos, slideshows.

Application of very simple descriptive code to these media types quickly facilitates their indexation within search results. Also by adding these basic image definitions, the image will become ‘visible’ to certain categories of disabled folk, assisting website ADA compliance.

Watch this super quick screen record video to see how easy it is to add alt tags to your image in the wordpress media gallery.

Note: Alt tags are very different to hash tags. Hashtags are one word or phrase, for example a hashtag I would put on an instagram post would be: #bigorangeplanetwebdesign.

Where as an alt tag i would write for the same image would be <alt>big orange planet make excellent websites</alt>