Are you Still Ignoring Website Accessibility?
For years, some SEOs have been guilty of adding alt text to images without much thought behind it. They use alt text as a way just to stuff keywords or because it looks good on a checklist of tasks.
However, that poor practice of SEO can easily be spotted, and as search engines got smarter, it became less effective.
Now don't get me wrong, there's SO much more to website accessibility than alt text, and I'll save that for another newsletter, but there are many reasons to make sure you are using alt text effectively.
I get it, though; there are often bigger battles to be had than optimising your alt text, but before writing it off completely, consider these points below.
- Alt text matters because it allows blind or partially sighted people to better "visualise" the image.
- Alt text adds context to images if the web page should fail to load for any reason.
- Search engines cannot "view" images, so alt text helps the search engines to comprehend what the image is about.
Accessibility is also becoming an increasingly important factor in organic rankings, so be careful not to get left behind.
So, before you write off alt text and accessibility together, remember that by doing so you could be excluding large portions of your audience!
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