The Main SEO Thing You’re Doing Wrong and How To Fix It

When you first start blogging, SEO seems like a bit of a minefield, but you soon come to see that it can actually be quite simple to nail the basics.

But just when you think you've got it, you realise that you're doing something wrong. Some of the main issues come when bloggers get that obsessed with SEO that it their posts lose all personality and become like keyword bingo, but that's not what I want to talk about today.

Today, I'm going to talk about the alt text on your images. This is something I did wrong for a long time, and in all honesty, still would be if it wasn't for the lovely Sassy over at Thinking Out Loud.

With that in mind, credit for this post must go to Sassy and I'm sure she's written something on the subject, but SEO is something I get asked about a lot so I thought I would share what she explained to me.

What Is Alt Text?

The alt text is the text that is displayed in place of an image in some cases. If your pictures don't load for some reason, then your site will display the alt text instead. And in the case of blind or visually impaired readers who are using a screen reader, then your alt text is read out to them.

All of your images on your blog should have an alt text tag. When you upload an image to your media gallery, select it and you'll see several boxes on the right hand side, one of which is labelled alt text. This is where you enter the alt text for your images.

What You're Doing Wrong and How to Fix It

Most bloggers use this box in some way to improve the SEO of their posts – even Yoast advises you to do this by entering your keywords in the alt text box.

And don't get me wrong, you should definitely have your keywords in there. It helps you rank on Google, and even if your post never makes it to the top three posts listed, your image just might as so many people don't bother using the alt text function.

When it all goes wrong is if you just use this box to keyword stuff. That won't score you any points anywhere. Personally, I would just pop my title into the box – after all, that was already SEO friendly on posts I wanted to rank, so it worked.

Or so I thought.

What I didn't take into account until it was pointed out to me (which I'm ashamed to admit to in hindsight) was that the post title rarely describes the image. So anyone using a screen reader was missing out on the images.

We've all heard the phrase a picture paints a thousand words and this is essentially true when it comes to anything on the internet, as those images are often what gets people's attention. So you've carefully selected images to improve your content, and then you exclude some of your readers from knowing what they contain.

So how do you fix it?

It's actually pretty simple. Describe the image. Yep. That's it.

Imagine that you couldn't see the picture you've chosen. What would you like to know about it? What are the most important elements of it? List those elements in the alt text box.

Now, as I mentioned above, it's still important to make sure the alt text is SEO friendly, so you do still need to get your keywords in there. You can do this in one of two ways:

Cleverly intertwine them in a seamless way so they're part of the image description. This works especially well on feature images where the post title (which should be SEO friendly) is an integral part of the image.

Write the image description and finish it with something like "Image for [post title])

It will take you a little bit longer, but it's definitely worth doing.

You might immediately assume that your blog has nothing to do with vision related disabilities so blind people aren't your target audience, but just because you're not writing about anything to do with being blind doesn't mean blind people aren't interested in your posts. There are blind parents, blind people who enjoy fashion etc. Why wouldn't you take an extra couple of minutes to make sure that they too can enjoy your posts?

Have you been using the alt text wrong? Will you be changing the way you use it in the future? Let me know in the comments 🙂

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