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IMG ALT attribute is an alternative text that is displayed to the user when the image is not found, giving the user a hint about what the image is. Typical example would go as this:

<img src=”/images/google-logo.jpg” alt=”Google logo” />

In most cases, you normally expect that the image will be shown rather than alternative text, and if you do have so many broken image links, then most likely the alternative text is not going to help you a lot attract many visitors anyways. That said however does not mean one should overlook the alt attribute at all, on the contrary. IMG ALT attribute is used by search engines like Google and Yahoo when indexing for images. The alt attribute is one very strong hint about the content of the image, and proper labeling would sure help the search engine return your images as relevant results to the users, and ofcourse, increase your site traffic.

Having followed that, and taking a look at Q8Ba7th site traffic, I found that over 3% of the total site traffic is coming from image searches, and not any image searches, but rather Google Image searches.

Two nice rules to follow for Image SEO are:

1. Image Names: Meaningful “-” separated file names, e.g. “Google-logo.jpg”
2. ALT Attributes: Short, meaningful and related, like alt=”Google logo”

Following such practices helps you get traffic, and the user get the desired images. Oh, and it also makes the job of the search engine a whole lot easier.

UPDATE: 3baid mentioned below the title attribute, which is used to give image description usually that the user sees when pointing his mouse over. It is also used for Image SEO, and while Google seems to be fine with one of them only, it’s probably a good idea for me as well to use both, as some other engines may use only one. I will need to look into how they treat it as spam. Video below posted on how Google treat the IMG attributes.

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