The text you use in the alt attribute has a multiplication affect because it counts as important text on the page (helping your page rank), adds keyword credit when the image is linked, and may help your images appear in Google image searches. Make sure to read my post 5 Things to Know When Writing Photo Alt Text for more on that subject.

Matt Cuts from Google gives his own explanation and rationale for alternate attributes in this video, saying to use them on ALL IMAGES!

Alt text is displayed in HTML as

<img src=”/image.jpg” alt=”Short description of the image” title=”Text that appears on mouse over” />

You may have noticed the title attribute in the above tag. Google Webmaster Central explains in its post, Using Alt Attributes Smartly:

Some of you have asked about the difference between the “alt” and “title” attributes. According to the W3C recommendations, the “alt” attribute specifies an alternate text for user agents that cannot display images, forms or applets. The “title” attribute is a bit different: it “offers advisory information about the element for which it is set.” As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate on the information provided in the “alt” attribute. Feel free to supplement the “alt” attribute with “title” and other attributes if they provide value to your users!

Let me read through the technical speak here and say that you mainly need to focus on the alternate text and not worry much about the title text. If it makes you feel better, I rarely use title text for my images (but I always use alt text).

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• 5 Things to Know When Writing Photo Alt Text

How should You Write Photo Alt Text?

1. Describe the photo

Sounds like a no-brainer right? Almost every photographer fails by trying to out think the search engine. The truth is that Google can spot tom-foolery a mile away. It prefers natural sounding text that a human would write and will give your content more credit when it is written this way. Take for example these 3 alternate texts for photos on my website:

• Bride walks down the aisle at her beautiful destination wedding with Pacific Ocean in the background
• Candid groomsmen pose for a photo as they wait by the Ritz Carlton hotel pool for the groom
• Lights twinkle at the evening reception for the Prez-King wedding in Los Angeles

The bold texts are keywords that I might rank for, but you notice they are casually placed in with true descriptions of the images. In reading these alternate texts you can really visualize the images, and you get a true sense for the type of website I have. You probably guessed that I shoot destination weddings including the Ritz and am based in Los Angeles. All of this from just 3 images! Google (and your readers) gain so much more from this type of writing that 3 alt texts that say “LA Wedding Photographer”

2. Use sentence structure

As you saw from the examples above, images should be described as one or maybe 2 fairly brief sentences. There’s not a rule to say what is too short or too long, as long as you describe the image. I use between 5 and 25 words. Be concise. After you’ve written it have a second look and take out any words that seem to be unnecessary.

3. Think niche and not broad

Labeling an image as “LA wedding photographer” is only valuable for maybe one image on the homepage of your site. And that image is never going to rank on its own for a broad term like that. Plus it becomes really hard to make that term unique for photo number 10, 100, and 1000 on your website or blog. So make your focus to rank for the smaller phrases that are still targeted to your business, but easier to rank for.

Niche phrases are ones you would never think a new client would use to find you, but even a few searches a month will start to add up. Think names of locations where you are shooting (wedding venues, parks, cities and suburbs, etc), think of adjectives (like best, cool, awesome, photojournalist, natural light, etc), think of your subjects (people’s names, breeds of animals, types of products, etc). You get the idea. Pretty soon you will get the majority of your traffic from hundreds of different keywords on random phrases like “Best farm photos of golden retrievers in Smalltown, USA.”

4. Repetition and keyword lists are the fastest way to spam

Galleries and blogs typically have a hundred or so images all loading on the same page. As the page loads you often see the photographers who have names all of their images with the same alt tag, something like “LA wedding photographer” or close variations. That just repeats the same text in the code 100 times for Google who now thinks you are trying to spam the keywords onto the page. Bottom line – use unique tags as often as possible. You can obviously repeat a tag if you have two images of the same subject matter and that is fine, just avoid doing blanket tagging for all your photos because it’s fast, easy, or you think it will rank you better.

5. Alt Text Alone Won’t Rank You

There are many elements that go into ranking a page or an image, and alt text alone won’t get you the top rank. Take this into consideration before going back to all of your old images and adding alternate text to them. It may not be worth the effort. I’d advise focusing only on your most important ones, then watch to see if you get any extra search traffic as a result of your efforts. If so then it may be worth adding alt tags to more images. Other elements that factor into image ranking include image age (older are better), image size (larger ones are better), text surrounding the image (like captions), etc. Just want you to be aware the alts are not the holy grail for image rankings.

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• Alt (or alternate text) attributes of the image tag in the HTML code
• Text surrounding the image (text and comments on the page, image tags, etc)
• Filename of the image (image.jpg)

Read more about the Photographer’s SEO Book that gives search engine optimization (SEO) tips for photography websites. Perfect for beginners with splash pages or photo website templates like SmugMug or BluDomain.

How Do I Edit Alt Attributes (or alternate text)?

To understand how Google looks at images watch this helpful Google video. It says that you can easily help Google understand what your images are about by using alt tags for all your images.  If you have access to the HTML code of your pages, simply add the alt and title attributes to your image tags as seen here.

<img src=”/image.jpg” alt=”Short description of the image”>

If you use a template or blog service, then often times the image caption or description will be used as the alt and title attributes. Check with your website provider to see how it generates these. Needless to say that every field offered in your system for images should be used, and used carefully, because it can help your SEO efforts.

Photographer Tips for alt attributes

• Use short complete sentences that describe the image
• Focus on minor (less competitive keywords). For example a family photographer might use alt phrases like “Easter Photos in the Park” or “Lake Family Reunion Pictures of the Smiths”
• Do NOT load keywords or use a list of comma delimited keywords

A Note About Photo Captions and SEO

Below is the image of this ebook cover in my WordPress blog. You can see I paid attention to everything from the filename to the image description and varied the text in each without overloading the keywords. It is natural flowing text that helps describe the image. Also notice that underneath the Caption field it tells me that this field is used as alternate text, so the coding part is done for me.

Photographers SEO Book Glossy Cover Photo

The text you use in the alt attribute has a multiplication affect because it counts as text on the page, adds keyword credit when the image is linked, and may help your images appear in Google image searches.

Page Text Helps Image Search Rank

In addition to the alt attribute, Google can interpret the images on a page by reading text surrounding an image. In photo galleries where little text may be available, it is critically important to use all your available resources to help Google. Here are some examples of page text photographers rarely take advantage of in galleries that definitely help images rank in searches:

• Gallery or image comments. User comments add content to your page without you doing any work. In a natural sounding way, comments often use words people are searching for that you may not have thought about!

• Image keywords or tags. Sites like Flickr, SmugMug and WordPress aggregate pages and photos based on the keyword tags you assign to them. Not only do these tags appear as text on the page, but the master sites (like http://www.smugmug.com/browse/) create links to you using these keywords. This is the best way to get ranked in search engines, so make sure to use the most popular keywords available (ones that big websites want to create links for).

• Image captions. As previously mentioned, some services use captions as the alternative text as well in addition to text on the page.

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