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Magento 2 Product Alt Text for SEO

Do you know that uploading images without considering the importance of alt text can have a negative impact on your website SEO? This is because search engines such as Bing, and Google, crawl web pages and cannot understand image files unless the alt tag has been set.

Therefore, alt text is important for search engines to better understand a page and give people the best results possible when searching online.

What is Alt Text?

Alt Text (alternative text) is the text or hypertext used to describe and replace elements on the page that bots or users can not read specific content such as images, java scripts snippets.

The publishers can create or not create Alt Text. However, creating Alt Text will bring a lot of benefits for the website in SEO, especially the websites use too many elements that the spider can not read. Google also encourages that you shouldn’t use too many images, and if possible use the text to replace the content of those images.

Code example

Code example

The importance of Alt Text for SEO

alt text

Alt Text is a word or phrase that describes the image on the web, it is very important for SEO. Google has announced that the search engine will focus on ALT text analysis. Google can not see the image and knows what the image says about what it reads only the image content through the Alt.

If there is no Alt text for the image, the browsers will display an empty error icon. Moreover, Alt Text also provides search engines content to index the website, so it would be good if the image using Alt Text contains keyword content. In addition, it also provides for a user’s search when they search for images instead of finding content on the browser.

The robots can not see the images on your web pages, they will crawl the alternative text. Therefore, when a user searches for images with keywords that appear in the alt attribute, the search engine returns results linking to your site. From that, it will help you gain better traffic and SEO capabilities.

alt text

How Alt Text Affects SEO

Google says that Alt Text is used not only to help the search engine understand the content of the image, but also the web in general. This may help increase the chances of your image appearing in image search results.

When creating content about a topic, consider how your audience might enjoy finding answers to their questions about that topic.

For example: A visitor searches for Layered Navigation for Magento 2; they might be interested in a screenshot so they can get a quick understanding of that plugin.

Since this image has optimized alt text, it appears in image search results for the longtail keyword “mageplaza layered navigation for magento 2”. Since the post also appears in web search results for the same keyword, visitors can visit the blog post through these two different channels.

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How to write a good Alt Text

In some cases, writing the bad Alt Text or irrelevant Alt Text will cause confusion about your page. Hence, determining appropriate Alt Text is very crucial for the search engine to read and crawl it. Some the guidelines below will help you to create effective alternative text for most situations.

Repeat text in the image for Alt Text

If the image has text describe, you can take that text as the alternative text. In addition, you can take the other words to replace that text, but that words should say the same thing as the image. For instances, if you have a logo for your images, the Alt Text should repeat the name of the company to replace the logo.

Keep the text short

A good rule of thumb for alternative text is to keep it around 125 characters. Because, the longer your Alt Text, the more difficult it will be for the browsers to read.

Use your keywords

Alt text provides for you the other opportunity to insert the keywords on a page. So search engines can appreciate the page higher.

Avoid keyword stuffing

You will be in trouble if you are too greedy to insert too many keywords. You only should focus on describing the text in the image, because Google will appreciate higher for the good Alt Text.

Don’t include “image of,” “picture of,” etc. in your alt text

With the image, it is already assumed your Alt Text is referring to an image, so you don’t need to specify it. You should start with the content of the image and remember that the Alt Text is short.

Review for spelling errors

You need to check spelling errors carefully, as misspelled words in alt text can affect user experience or confuse search engines while they crawl your site.

Don’t add alt text to every image

You ought to add alt text to most images on your website for the sake of SEO and UX; however, there are exceptions. Don’t need to add alt text to all images. For example: Image that is entertaining or described in text nearby, you should leave blank.

Don’t forget longdesc=””

Explore using the longdesc=”” tag for more complex images that require a longer description.

Don’t neglect form buttons

If a form on your site uses an image as a “submit” button, give it an alt attribute. Remember that image buttons should have an alt attribute describing the button’s functionality like, “search”, “subscribe now”, “subscribe”, etc.

How to Add Alt Text to Images?

Where do you begin when developing alt text for your blog posts and website? Consider doing a basic check of your existing content to see where you can incorporate alt text into previously untagged photos. Monitor how your organic traffic changes between the pages where you offer the new alt tag. The more images you optimize, the better your SEO strategy will be in the future.

In order to add an alt tag to the tag in the HTML code, you can follow as below:

Image with an alt tag:

<img src=“pie.jpg” alt=“steak and ale pie”>

If you’re using a modern CMS, you can add alt text without having to dig into the HTML code.

Alt text in the WordPress system

Most Content Management Systems (CMS), including WordPress, provide users with the functionality to insert Alt text in the image optimization area. You can follow these steps to add alternative text to an image in Magento 2.

Step 1: In the Admin Panel, open the product, then click on the Images tab.

Step 2: Choose the image to which you want to add alt text.

Step 3: In the Alt Text field, fill in the text you want to use as the alt text for the image.

Step 4: Save the changes.

If you have a large number of images and want to automate the process of adding alt text, you can use a third-party extension such as Magento 2 Image Alt Tags Extension. This extension allows you to automatically create SEO-optimized alt tags for your product images using product attributes such as product name, product SKU, category name, etc

Conclusion

Look at pretty much any website on the Web today and you will see that one of the indispensable things is images. Your site’s images properly use Alt Text is a very important part of using these images for the Web. Make sure that Alt Text for your images is good for search engines to read and understand. According to that, your site is ranked higher. You can set up automatic rules for adding image Alt text also to get rid of the manual work, so definitely try it out. You can find the guide to do it in this tutorial.

Magento 2 SEO plugin from Mageplaza will be a perfect choice for your online store. With this extension, you only install without any code modifications. Especially, if you need to insert meta keywords and meta descriptions for your product, it is also friendly with your store. From that, it will do perfectly for your better SEO.

Image Description
Sam is the CEO & co-founder of Mageplaza, a company established to support Magento merchants with different powerful tools and resources. Sam Nguyen is also the CEO & founder of Avada Commerce, an e-commerce solution provider headquartered in Singapore – aiming to support more than a million online businesses to grow and develop.
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