Are Alt Attributes Important?
What are alt attributes?
Alt attributes are pieces of text attached to images used as descriptive information about what the image is showing. In most cases, you will not see these attributes. These attributes were originally used so that if for any reason a browser could not render the image (possibly due to compatibility reasons, or internet connection) then the alt attribute would instead display text to describe what the image should be showing.
Why were they important?
In the early days of search engines, all would compete with one another to show the most relevant information, fast. Despite not being the first search engine, Google took the lead very quickly as it always managed to show the most relevant information that more often than not, had the answer searchers were looking for. Google used a variety of different algorithms to do this, some of which are still used today. One large factor Google used was the number of times a Keyword was on a website. For example, if you’re looking for a Wedding Cake company, Google used to bring up websites which had a lot of mentions of ‘Wedding’ and ‘Cake’. Not a bad idea, until you started to find that you’d come across websites filling up every other word on their website with ‘Wedding’ and ‘Cake’. As Google can’t read images and determine what they are they relied on the alt attribute to explain to them what the image was showing. Once again, the SEO Analysts saw this as a good way to stuff some more keywords into the website.
Let use this image as an example for our Wedding Cake Company. Years ago, SEO Analysts would have set the alt attribute as ‘Wedding Cake Company’ along with every other image on the website. This is wrong. The correct Alt Attribute for this should be ‘Woman in a white dress holding a bouquet of flowers’.
Are they important now?
Just to reiterate, for SEO purposes, they aren’t really important; but for some people, they can be really important. Google asks that web designers still populate images with the alt attribute, but ask that they ensure it contains a description of the image. This is mainly in case of three factors:
- The Browser is slow to load or render the images, it may not load the entire image, but just load the alt attribute for a description of the image.
- For people that may have a visual impairment, they can use a specific browser which will read out the content out loud. This will not be able to describe an image without the use of the alt attribute.
- Some people may use a text-based browser that does not render images or video but instead, just display the alt attribute.
If I don’t have alt attributes should I be worried?
I wouldn’t say so. Some SEO Companies are a bit slow to catch up and still place a lot of relevance on alt attributes, they also use it as a scare tactic in ‘SEO audits’ as SEO companies would most likely put their time into more worthwhile efforts leaving alt attributes blank for some images. This isn’t a necessarily a good thing, but it’s not a bad thing either. So don’t worry!
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