User Experience and SEO: Do not Sacrifice either of them Part 1

Talking about providing a great user experience, what comes to your mind?

The web design.

Right.

What else?

Images or to be precise graphics.

Now you are talking. The web design is highly restricted by the usability. You cannot experiment much with the design as it may lead to a bad navigation and instead of acquiring new leads, you start losing the old ones too. The images that you use in the content is, however, a different story. The images in the content are your best chance to engage the audiences. The social media know the importance of the visuals and that is evident from your NewsFeed.

While everyone is telling you that visuals should be used to make the content more readable, we are saying you no different. According to the best SEO Company, there should be an image after every 300 words. It gives the readers a time to take a break from the heavy text. Let us see how we can use the images in the content keeping the SEO in mind.

#1. It is necessary to use alt attribute for the images that are important for your rankings. For example, if there is an image depicting different types of flowers while your content is based on ‘ancient flowers’ use the alt tag to tell Google bots the aim of the image and why it is placed on the content. The alt text also helps your image to rank for the image search.

#2. Ditch the alt text if the image is of no use and just lying there for the decoration purchases. The background image or the default template image are not crucial for your content so use alt attribute as alt- “” which means null.

#3. If you are using an image (for example buttons) with the text link to direct to another page, it is good to not use alt attribute for the image and keep the text link at the place. Using the alt tag and keeping the link would appear repetitive. If you are using the alt attribute, remove the text link.

#4. The alt text should be kept short and more understandable. If there is lot of things that you want Google bots to know about your image, write that in the caption. The alt attribute which is around 125-characters long is considered bot friendly. Well, there is no guideline but it is a general practice that seems to be working.

#5. We cannot focus on this point enough but you should not stuff keywords in the alt attribute. Your keywords may stand a chance for the robots to retrieve your results better in the search engine but for the image search, it is a recipe to fail. Write what the image is about not what you want to rank for. A general image like laughing baby has more chances to show up in the image search for cute baby or laughing baby than for ‘baby nutritionist’. People may not search for the image of a bay nutritionist. Why would they?

#6. The alt attribute should be different from the caption. They are two different space and so you should use them wisely. If your alt attribute is enough to describe the image, do not write the caption. If you are writing a caption, leave the alt attribute.

#7. Do not use captions like ‘first, second...’ or ‘figure no.1’. They are useless for your SEO. Write the caption that defines the image.

#8. If you are using the Doodle or text as images, do not put important information to be indexed only on the image. Google bots do not index the content on the image but behind it( the alt attribute).

These are what make your images a better content for the search bots. This is all behind the image practice, you can handle the visible part well. If you need any help, contact any SEO local to your area and get started. Part 2 is just coming up.