Images are used as a background, to break up the text, to demonstrate relevant visual examples and samples of the promoted product. Graphic information will help convey information to the user more easily and quickly, focusing his attention on key aspects. Therefore, images continue to be in demand. Their size is optimized, vector graphics are used and scaling is used for different viewport sizes. This has a positive effect on the loading speed of ordinary and cross-platform sites.

Images can be optimized for SEO. The result will be a new channel of image search traffic. This function is used in search engines. Queries like “%item of interest photo” are becoming more common. In order to take this traffic, you need to correctly optimize the images using 2 attributes of the <img> tag - alt and title. They may contain the same information to simplify development, but they perform different tasks.

Purpose alt

Alt should contain alternative text displayed where the image is displayed if it did not load, was deleted, or the user disabled the display of images. Populating this attribute is one of the W3C standards, which has a positive impact on validations.

Alt is important for optimization, since you can use keywords in the description. Search engines have not yet learned to recognize images, but robots have long been using this attribute to search through images.

Recommendations for filling out alt:

  • honest information. The description must match the image and content of the page. If the pictures are used for dilution and do not carry a semantic load, it is better to leave the tag blank or delete it;

     

  • minimum length – 3 words. Otherwise it will be difficult to describe the image. You can write a maximum of 250 characters (search robots do not take more text from alt). You should not use all keywords. The robot will see the over-optimization and apply a filter;

     

  • The title of the page and the alt image should not match. The search engine considers this behavior as over-optimization. The image will drop out of the index;

     

  • many identical alts are bad. The reason is similar to the previous point. This problem is critical for online stores, where dozens of identical products are displayed on one page. The way out of this situation is to indicate the name and article number of the product. But the likelihood of images being saved in the index will decrease.

The importance of alt for Google in organic search

The main search engines for our region demonstrate a heterogeneous reaction to the contents of the alt attribute. Google considers it like ordinary words in the text of a page. The result of using keywords will be a demonstration of documents with images.

For Yandex alt is less significant. It ignores it in organic search. Therefore, filling will not affect traffic growth.

The title attribute

The title content is shown when you hover over the image. It is designed to provide the user with expanded information. If there is nothing special to say about the image, you can rewrite the alt content into this tag.

It is noteworthy that this attribute is taken into account when searching by images exclusively by the search engine from Yandex. Therefore, filling it out can be used to get additional traffic.

But the main task of title – usability improvement . This may have an indirect impact on rankings. The user will receive more information and stay on the site longer.