Optimize Your Images & Meet Accessibility Standards with Strong ALT tags!

A well-designed industrial website with informative content and visual interest can really set you apart from the competition.  And of course, it goes without saying that you’ll include clear, detailed images of your products either as part of a shopping cart system or simply to demonstrate your capabilities in a photo gallery or throughout the site.  The importance of using images to demonstrate your services and capabilities as an industrial or commercial company can’t be emphasized enough.  There are some extra steps you can take with your product or facility images that can give you an extra advantage in the search engines and help your visitors, also.

Optimize Your Images with ALT Tags

ALT tags provide a text alternative to an image.  This alternative text is implemented in the code of the website and appears as a tooltip in certain browsers.  ALT tags serve two key purposes.  First, they are important to meeting accessibility standards in that they provide a ‘description’ of the image to those users who might not be able to see the image and are using a screen reader to ‘view’ the website.  The description assigned to the image helps provide context and accurate information to vision-impaired users and helps them to better navigate and use a website.

The second purpose is to inform web crawlers of what the image is or represents.  When spidering your site, a search engine looks at your content, images, and code in determining the importance of the subject matter of your website.  By including keywords relevant to the image in the image’s ALT tag, you are providing information the engine can use to better index your site.  Images with correctly implemented ALT tags tend to show up in the top results of Image Searches.  It’s another place web users can find your products or services above and beyond standard web search results.

What is a good ALT tag?

The W3C recommends that the ALT text fulfills the same function as the image itself. When deciding upon the text you use to describe your images, it very important that you keep the people who are unable to see your images in mind.

A great example of this is a picture of a machinist performing waterjet cutting in your facility.  The ALT tag for this image should read to the effect of “Waterjet Cutting at ABC Company” or “Machinist Performing Water Jet Cutting”.  You do not want to use a tag like “Waterjet Cutting, Abrasive Waterjet Cutting”

Alt tags that are full of keywords and do not describe the image are not following W3C usability guidelines and is a lesser form of keyword stuffing. When a vision-impaired person is surfing the web, they are normally using software that reads aloud the entire page. How frustrating it would be to have to listen to an ALT tag that is “stuffed” with keywords!

If you format your ALT tags correctly, you can ensure accessibility and help search engines better index your site.  As of this writing, Google, Yahoo and Live/MSN all index ALT tags on images.  And while the importance of the ALT tag to indexing is relatively poor in Google it is of average and high importance respectively in Yahoo and Live/MSN.  Why miss out on this opportunity to gain extra web presence in major search engines?  Implement strong ALT tags and give your site that extra boost!

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