Make your images more accessible

I just watched a short video over at Google Webmaster Central where Matt Cutts explains about image alt attributes and how they should be best employed to help Google.

Use the link above if you want to see the post and video because I don’t really want to repeat their whole post here. I would add that it’s something many webmasters are probably guilty of.

It can be hard to think of good alt text sometimes for an image that you’re adding to a page, but you should make the effort because it’s easier to do it immediately and you start to get any benefits sooner.

Keyword stuffing the alt text is likely to get you into trouble eventually so it’s best avoided, but it’s perfectly legitimate – and sensible – to use a valid name. For example, if your image is of the ecover of the latest guru product that you’re promoting, it would be logical and sensible to use the product name as the image filename. Just don’t repeat it twenty times!

From personal experience when I’ve inspected the source code to tons of sites that I’ve looked at/fixed for various website owners, not all of them use the alt attribute anything like as much as they should. I’m guilty of that too!

Remember it doesn’t have to be anything clever, just simple text describing the image. Combined with a good image name that could translate into better search engine results and more visitors and at the very least it will help anyone using a screen reader to make sense of your site.

Do watch the video and then read the comments. Seems even Google gets it wrong about whether something is a tag or an attribute!