What Is Alt Text?
Updated: Feb 2, 2022
Optimization, Rankings, And Alt text Best Practices For Law Firms
All web pages benefit from images. They make a page more visually appealing, helps the presentation of a topic, and make it less intimidating than a giant wall of text. Adding a good alt tag to all of your photos enhances site accessibility and helps Lawyer SEO for both image and web searches.
Alt text characterizes (also known as alternative text or alt attribute) or describes an image, which helps both visually impaired users and site crawlers. The alt text is usually hidden when a page is viewed from a browser, but it becomes visible when an image fails to load. Screen readers can also detect alt texts because they're in HTML.
Why Are Alt Texts Important?
You should add alt texts to your images for the following reasons:
When an image cannot be loaded, the alt text is displayed in its place (this can happen when users have low bandwidth connections).
The alt text boosts accessibility. Users who use screen readers can hear a description of the image.
Search engines use the alt texts to determine what an image is about.
The alt text is used as the anchor text of an image that's hyperlinked.
Despite the advancements in technology, there is really no way for algorithms to accurately detect what's on your images. This is why you're often advised not to include an article or page's important texts and quotes in an image. Alt texts allow you to supply this information and helps crawlers decide how to index them on image search.
What's The Role Of Alt Text In Lawyer SEO?
When it comes to Lawyer SEO, alt text helps search engine crawlers know and understand the images you use on your pages. While image processing algorithms have been used, crawlers still rely on alt texts to clue them in on what the image is.
Here are other reasons why alt texts are considered an important factor in Lawyer SEO:
1. Alt Texts Help You Rank Higher In The Web Results
Google can use the value of the alt text to rank a page in the search results. For the best optimization, make sure your Alt text includes the SEO keywords you want to compete and rank for; without keyword stuffing, of course (more on this later).
2. Images Can Rank Higher On Image Search
When it comes to ranking images in Image Searches (like Google Image Search), alt text is especially crucial.
On Google, there are millions of people looking for photographs, and if you want your images to rank well, you must make sure to do the following:
Provide meaningful, descriptive, and relevant alt texts.
Images should be relevant to the texts on the page.
Use high-resolution photos.
Use descriptive filenames.
To learn more about this, we have previously covered Image Optimization in a previous post.
What's A Good Alt Text?
As a guide to help you write them for Lawyer SEO, here's is a list of what makes good alt texts:
1. It Should Be Descriptive
The primary purpose of having an alt text is to provide a textual description of an image. So avoid using irrelevant keywords and complex terminology. Instead, keep it clear and concise, but enough that people know what the image is without even looking at it.
2. Avoid One-Word Alt Texts
While there's no exact rule, try not to exceed 125 characters long. Likewise, it would be best if you also avoided one-word alt texts. One-word alt texts don't provide any descriptive value for both users and site crawlers.
Remember: The alt text can improve your chances of ranking high for long-tail keywords in Google image search, especially in the case of common stock photos.
3. Use Keywords
Alt texts help you rank in the image search, so you should definitely use keywords. However, as per the standard Lawyer SEO rule, this doesn't mean you can stuff keywords into your alt texts.
Here are two things to remember before using keywords for your alt texts:
Keywords should match or be relevant to your images. You won't have meaningful and keyword-rich alt text if you use photos that don't match.
Use semantically relevant keywords instead of your main keywords. It's often difficult to include the main keyword in the alt text, so using related keywords can be a great second option. This is especially useful if you can't find images to match your main keywords.
4. All Your Images Should Have An Alt Text
All of your site's images—including your logo, buttons, icons, and backgrounds—should have an alt text.
Remember: The main reason for having an alt text is to improve accessibility. Users and crawlers alike need these descriptions to clue them in on what's on your pages.
How Can LawyerLeadMachine Assist Your Law Firm?
Using Lawyer SEO strategies can boost traffic and conversions on your website. Knowing how competitive the legal profession can be, Law Firm Marketing can really give your firm a head start. To get you started, review your options here.
