Making Images Accessible and SEO-Friendly

As website owners, marketers, or content creators, we often get caught up in the visual aspects of our web pages—sleek designs, clear images, and attractive graphics. However, we should also focus on factors that may not be visible but play an important role in both user experience and search engine optimization (SEO). One such thing is alternative text, or “alternative text,” for images.

In this blog post, we will delve into the world of alt text to understand its importance in website accessibility, SEO, and user engagement. We’ll also look at how to automate alt text with the API.

What is Alt Text?

Alternative text, often abbreviated as alt text, is a short description that you can attach to images on your website. This definition is usually not visible to ordinary users but is accessible to search engines and assistive technologies such as screen readers, which are used by visually impaired people.

For example, when you add an image in WordPress you have the option to add Alt Text to the image description.

Accessibility: Making the Web Inclusive

About 285 million people worldwide are visually impaired. By leaving out some text, you’re indirectly excluding a significant number of people from fully discovering your website.

How Alt Text Helps

• Screen Readers: These devices read alt text, providing context for images that are otherwise indecipherable.
• Broken Links: If the image fails to load, the alt text will be displayed in its place, keeping some level of user information.

SEO: Beyond Just Keywords

Search engines like Google use sophisticated algorithms to index websites. Even though they are very advanced, they still cannot “see” pictures. Different text helps search engines understand the content and context of the image.

How Alt Text Improves SEO

• Improved Indexing: Unique descriptive text allows search engines to better index your images, which has the potential to increase your site’s page rank.
• Keyword Opportunities: The logical use of keywords in your alt text can improve the relevance of your content and, therefore, SEO performance.

User Engagement: More Than Meets the Eye

Beyond accessibility and SEO, well-designed alt text can improve user engagement.

Why It Matters

• Translation of content: For users who cannot upload images (perhaps due to slow internet), the alt text gives them a clue about what they are saying.
• Descriptions of navigation: Some browsers display alt text as a tooltip when hovering over an image, adding to the user experience.

Best Practices for Alt Text

• Explain But Briefly: Identify another short yet descriptive text.
• Avoid Skipping: If the image is already defined in the surrounding text, keep the alt text small.
• Enter Keywords Less: While good for SEO, keyword stuffing can lead to penalties.

Generate Alt Text via API

Choosing an alternative image text can be a challenge, especially if you have a lot of images. Another way to automate the process is to use an API to generate alt text.

For example, Ayrshare’s Max Pack add-on provides the ability to generate alt text with an endpoint.

const API_KEY = "API_KEY";
fetch(" {
      method: "POST",
      headers: {
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
        "Authorization": `Bearer ${API_KEY}`
      },
      body: JSON.stringify({
        url: " //required
        keywords: ["vehicle"], // optional
        lang: "en" // optional
      }),
    })
      .then((res) => res.json())
      .then((json) => console.log(json))
      .catch(console.error);

Simply give URL in the image with optional parameters of keywords including and language and another text will be generated automatically.

Next picture:

generates alt text: “Ghostbusters car driving around.” Very accurate description!

There are over 100 languages ​​to choose from when generating your unique text. Try it es for Spanish.

More Important Than You Think

Adding unique text to your website images may seem like a small detail, but its impact on accessibility, SEO, and user engagement is minimal. It’s a small step to creating an inclusive and effective web experience for everyone – and it’s easy when you generate alt text with an API. So the next time you upload an image, don’t overlook some text—it’s more important than you might think.