Images are visually appealing. When a visitor enters a website, they will not spend much time on a page that has a layout that they do not like. In addition, the images "break" the text and soften the visual appearance of large blocks of text in pages that contain a lot of information. Thus, visual elements are important allies to the user experience.

However, many people are unaware of the role of images in SEO. Today we explain why the images are very important to the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website.

SEO optimization is more important than ever. Millions of searches are done daily by users looking for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems. An optimized site is benefited by Google in search results, causing more people to find your page.

Like text and other content, images are analyzed by Google bots called "crawlers." A crawler is a robot that runs the internet looking for relevant pages for each search. The Google crawler is called Googlebot. As so, there is an essential element for image optimization: the alt text.

Alt or alt text is used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify alternate or substitute text that is rendered when the HTML element to which it is applied is not rendered. Alt allows informationto be rendered in various ways and by various user agents. In simpler terms, the image alt text is the description of it. Because they can read words, Google robots "read" that description and rank it accordingly, benefiting those images and, as a consequence, the site from which they come from, in search results.

When you search for a certain subject on google, images related to this topic appear in search results. These images are sorted using the Alt text assigned to them. Like any search, users tend to click on the images that appear in the first positions and access the websites from which they come.

So by using the right keywords in the Alt tag and description of the images, these can direct traffic to your site.

Alt text is also used by the visually impaired. The visually impaired usually access the internet through voice readers that read HTML code. So-called "screen readers" are software that read the information on a page through a speech synthesizer. If there are images, the publisher should include a description in the source code that explains the content of the image. The"Alt" text consists of a description of what the image shows.

In this way, a blind will know what your site shows.

Images are very important to website’s SEO, so it is essential to treat them with the same rigour that other elements of a page are treated.