The vast digital landscape is forever evolving. Billions of web pages are competing for the attention of both users and search engines. It is essential for those businesses with a digital presence to employ a successful SEO strategy for that very reason! There are a number of SEO techniques to ensure that your content stands out to search engines, further improving your rankings on SERPs. Among other crucial techniques, meta tags and alt text are important elements to optimise your content for search engines. You might be thinking “How can I use meta tags and alt text to optimise my content for search engines?” If so, this blog is for you!
At GrowTraffic, we work hard to improve your website’s visibility, boost your search engine rankings and in turn, grow your business! Our blog aims to offer advice and guidance when it comes to SEO and digital marketing efforts. Here we will explore how you can harness the power of meta tags and alt text in your SEO strategy.
What Are Meta Tags and Alt Text?
Before we dive in head first to how we may use meta tags and alt text to optimise your content for search engines, let’s strip it right back to basics and first gain an understanding of what meta tags and alt text are.
Meta Tags:
Meta tags are snippets of code that provide information to search engines, regarding a web page’s content. You may see meta tags in a number of different ways:
- Title Tag: This is the page’s title – the clickable link of text in search engine results
- Meta Description Tag – This is the brief summary of the page, usually displayed underneath the title tag.
Alt Text:
Alt text, short for alternative text, refers to the description of an image in the code. Alt text is an important SEO technique for a number of reasons:
- It boosts accessibility of your website by providing a text description for visually impaired users who rely on screen readers.
- Search engines use alt text to understand and index images.
Optimise Your Content For Search Engines With Meta Tags
There are a number of ways that you can use meta tags to optimise your content for search engines.
- Title Tag Optimisation – The title tag is a crucial meta tag for SEO. It’s important to make it unique and descriptive, including the page’s keyword.
- Meta Description Tag: Meta description tags need to be concise yet compelling, also including relevant keywords – this is what should encourage users to visit your page!
Optimise Your Content For Search Engines With Alt Text
There are several things to consider when you are optimising your content for search engines with alt text.
- Be Descriptive – When writing alt text for images, be literal and descriptive, providing content about what is in the image. My top tip when writing alt text is to imagine you are describing the image to someone who can’t see it.
- Use Keywords – Incorporate your keyword into your alt text if relevant.
- Don’t Skip It – Alt text is a must when it comes to SEO, don’t skip it! Ensure that every image on your website has alt text.
How To Optimise Your Content For Search Engines
Meta tags and alt text are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to optimising your content.
It is no secret that content plays an absolutely enormous role in boosting your visibility and driving traffic to your site – but content that isn’t optimised doesn’t do much more than sit on the shelf. Beyond meta tags and alt text, there are plenty of things to consider when it comes to optimising your content for search engines.
- Consistency – Ensure consistency across your site, especially when it comes to meta tags and alt text. It’s important to keep on top of it to help search engines better understand your content.
- Regular Updates – Review and update meta tags and alt text to keep them current and relevant.
- Mobile Friendly: Creating content that is mobile friendly is important for SEO. Meta tags and alt text also need to be optimised for mobile users. Mobile optimisation is becoming more and more of a significant ranking factor.
Optimise Your Content For Search Engines With GrowTraffic
Optimising your content for search engines through meta tags and alt text is a fundamental step toward improving your website’s visibility and rankings.
If you need a helping hand in incorporating these SEO techniques into your content strategy or have any questions about what I have explored in today’s blog, feel free to get in touch with a member of our team.
You can call us today on 0161 706 0012 or email info@growtraffic.co.uk.
