The terms alt tag and title tag are commonly used in search engine optimization, as both are required to optimize the website in terms of on-page SEO.
What is an alt tag?
The term “alt tag” stands for “alternative tag” and is used to display an image description if images cannot be displayed. The alt tag is also part of the metadata that is not visible to the user. However, alt tags now also fulfill the purpose of accessibility and can be inserted via HTML, whereby the large content management systems such as WordPress already have an input field with which the alt tag can be determined. In any case, it should be used sensibly – keyword stuffing and similar is also considered spam by Google.
What are alt attributes?
Alt attributes are part of the HTML standard, which can be used to output alternative texts for embedded images. In this case, it is again a question of accessibility, as screen readers for visually impaired people will read out the alt attribute. It therefore makes sense to describe the image instead of including keywords. Accessibility is rewarded by search engines.
Influence on search engine optimization
The alt attribute is important for search engines because it can be used to interpret the content of the image. Originally, the robots had no way of reading the image. Artificial intelligence is already advanced here – but this function is still in a beta phase. The title attribute is another element that the crawlers classify. The title tag is also displayed when the visitor moves the mouse over an image. This tag is also used by Google to interpret the content and thus index it in the image search.
Title tag for subpages
However, a title tag does not only exist for images, but for every website or its subpages. An optimized title tag can be a ranking factor and also encourage clicks. Google measures the title size in pixels, so a SERP generator should always be used to assess whether the title is long enough or has already become too long.
