Page 45 - Payout Magazine Online Volume 9.6
P. 45
Great Content is Not Just Words a restaurant. The latter is by far most common,
and most commonly wrong!
It’s been said over and over pictures speak
a thousand words. That’s true today and more Take your time and craft your best
than ever, graphics, including pictures, bring description of the image, including keywords
about emotion - happiness, sadness, or anger. related to your site. Keywords are, regardless
Emotions must match the content. of what you may hear, still important in SEO.
Don’t consider using too many because the
Emotions cause people to act. It’s up to search engines flag your content as keyword
you to decide which action you want of your stuffed, whether in content or in alt text.
readers. An image of a serene sunset over
a sprawling ocean or a quiet walk in a park Instead of exact match keywords, semantic
encourages feelings of peace. Your content keywords work very well. Words related to the
should embrace emotions of peace and topic of your site tell people what your site is
tranquility. Writing effective, SEO friendly alt about, and you won’t risk getting penalized
text would describe the image to evoke such for using too many keywords. Also, relevancy
feelings. matters with keywords.
Why Alt Text is Important Best practices for alt text include writing
descriptively and accurately. A maximum
Today’s searchers are sophisticated and of 125 characters (about two sentences) is
Google and Bing know this. Inexperienced appropriate and won’t risk having part of the
searchers seem satisfied with a list of text text cut off by character limits.
results of their search. More demanding
searchers ask the engines for more details, Keep Images Small in File Size
such as associated graphics and images. (Optimized)
During routine crawling by search engine A well designed and optimized website
bots of image alt text and images, effective includes light, small file size images. They load
alt text assists indexing and provides results quick and won’t affect page speed, which if
leading to favorable placement in Google slow frustrates readers to the point of leaving
image search results. This results in more your site. Search engines, especially Google,
traffic to your site in addition to that gained by rank your site lower if it loads slowly. Images
ranking well for content! are notorious for causing slow page loading
times.
What’s more is by adding good alt text bots
crawl and index, your website appears more WordPress offers several photo resizing
SEO ready which leads to a more favorable plugins designed for this purpose. Or, other
SERPS placement. programs offer several options such as
resizing or changing the file type (i.e. JPEG,
How to Write SEO Friendly Alt Text GIF, or PNG). Each format has its advantages
for changing file size but sacrifice quality as a
Images and graphics evoke different tradeoff. Study each and follow manufacturer
emotions in people. Defining what your website recommendations.
is and its perception to readers requires
setting objectives and from that, creating goals Writing SEO friendly alt text for your images
for images on the site. You don’t want to risk helps get your images indexed in all search
alienating readers from your site because of engines, but more importantly, pleases your
mixed messages unintentionally conveyed by readers. Creating great content but falling short
your choice of graphics or images. in helping every reader enjoy your site should
never happen. Always make sure your content
If your site is about a restaurant in your is easily shared and enjoyed by everyone. Write
city, describing a photo of the interior with a good alt text for each and every image to make
couple enjoying their meal in a romantic, low it happen! Good luck!
light setting replete with candles burning and
soft music playing is an example of good alt
text. Compare that to people eating dinner in
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