The ALT Tag on Images
When adding images to your website, it’s important to include the ALT tag or “alternative text.” The ALT tag can help to bring more visitors to your site as well as display information about a picture. There are good reasons reasons to always remember to add the ALT tag.
Indexing. Since images by themselves are not indexed, the ALT gives a description of the image that helps web spiders categorize it. Pictures that have the ALT tag can show up in Google index searches and potentially bring visitors to your website.
Accessibility. Some visitors to your website might be using a text browser or have a setting that permits images from loading. A slow connection or an old computer could be two possible reasons a person might prefer to surf the web without seeing images. Since the ALT tag text shows in place of pictures that fail to load, the visitor will at least get to read what the picture was and knowing what they are missing.
Give Information about an Image. A mouse hover over an image will result in the ALT tag being displayed in a yellow box. This makes using the alternative text a way to let your readers know a little bit more about an image.
Adding the alternative text to an image has a very simple syntax. Here is a sample using the ALT image tags. I have left off the opening and closing brackets so that it will appear on screen.
img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com/images/myimage.com alt=”My Image Text”
Here is an example of the ALT tag in action. Use your mouse to learn more about the image.
If you are using WordPress, just fill in the “title” information to have the alt tag automatically added to your images. Using the ALT tag can take a while to get use to will be worth the extra effort.
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