Image Alt Tags Checker

Importance of Alt Text and Image Titles

Image Alt Tag (in HTML: “alt”). The attribute is used to describe your image in a textual format. This allows search engines to get a better understanding of your image since they can’t necessarily comprehend the image. The image title can be similar to the source.

Title tags and alt tags are commonly confused with one another. Let’s take a look at how they differ… While the alt tag is used by search engine crawlers to determine what your content is, title attributes provide extra information about the subject and are not crawled by bots. Therefore, image title tags aren’t as important to your site’s SEO, however they do result in an improvement of accessibility online. If an image is missing, the alt text will show in its place; however the title text appears in a popup in certain browsers when a visitor hovers their mouse over the image.

Other SEO Best Practices for Images

Images are important to SEO; if done correctly, they’ll show up at the top of Google Images and link back to your site, bringing you a ton of traffic you may have missed out on otherwise. To help achieve higher rankings for your site, here are some SEO best practices for your visual content to get the most traffic from search engines.

Naming Your Images Proper

Google’s ranking algorithm calculates images, so properly naming your images can help your site rankings. Before naming and uploading an image, you should first decide on a proper keyword to use.

In the image’s filename, you should include relevant keywords from a specific subject. Instead of uploading your image as “IMG_1234. JPG” try using a keyword rich name like “iphone-6s-screen-protector” if you have a picture of Screen Protector of iPhone 6s Mobile Phone. It’s also important to use dashes ( - ) and not underscores ( _ ) when separating keywords, as Google looks at underscores as a joiner of words, rather than a separator. In addition, be sure to include your main keywords at the front of the file name, not the end.

Compress Images for Faster Load Times

Images can be the culprit to a slow site, as they make up around 60 percent of a page’s size. Therefore, optimizing your images for web upload will speed up page load time, ultimately preventing Google from penalizing your site rankings due to slow page load times.

Images that load faster due to being optimized for web will make your site load faster, and in return give you better SEO.

Image Sitemaps

Use Image XML sitemaps to increase the chance of your images being indexed by search engines. Tags such as and can be used within these sitemaps to provide additional information about your images.