How to Add ALT text and Title to an Image

Adding alternative text(ALT) to an image along with a title is a useful addition if you want to get your images indexed by search engines. If you mouse over the image in this post you will find a title shows up and if you then right click on the image and open properties you will find the alternative text I have written to describe the image.

So why add alternative text? Well thats easy to answer since a bot from a search engine when crawling your page with an image on it cannot "see" the image. But it can read text, so it is then is able to classify what it finds. Alternative text also has another important role since it will be displayed if the image is not available for some reason. Therefore the ALT text should be descriptive and not stuffed with keywords!

There are one or two fields of thought on adding a title. Some say its unnecessary other advocate adding a title if the image points to a link. Personally I am currently experimenting to see if images with titles get indexed quicker.

So how do you add ALT and TITLE text to an images code? Its quite easy and if you are using a platform like Blogger the text can be added after you upload the image into the post editor. These instructions relate to my experiences using the Blogger platform and the older version of the post editor.

1. Upload image to a post.

2. Click Edit HTML tag on editor.

You should see something like this at the top if thats where you placed the image:

3. Now locate alt="" in the code and insert your description of the photograph between the inverted commas.

4. If you want to add a title- Insert: title= "" after your alt text, leave 1 space. Insert your title between the inverted commas.

5. The finished article should look like this:


6. Preview your post to check everything is okay. Mouse over should reveal title while right clicking and opening properties will show alternative text and title along with other information.

One final thought on images. Make sure you save your image with a suitable file name in your image processing software. By default it will be something like this, 1234.jpg. While the file extension is fine and can be read by a search engine a suitable text file name is much more search engine friendly. In the above example you can see the file name is Zebra+Kenya.jpg.

Blogger user tip: Spell check your post before modifying the image code as any spelling errors in the alt or title text like foreign names or words not in spell checker will interfere with how your image is displayed. If you forget go back to HTML view and remove the error code, but be careful what you take out!

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