My friend, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. Did you know that you could be missing out on more than 20% of global web searches because you failed to do one key SEO optimization? It's called image alt text, and it's a classic HTML tool that the world is waking up to. What makes these tags so important? Image searches make up 22.6% of the total internet searches, according to the most recent data. That's billions of people using images to find what they're looking for online. Image alt text heavily influences Google's image results by providing text descriptions of your images that can be easily indexed by the algorithms. Yet despite the clear benefits, 55% of ecommerce sites fail to properly use alt text, and it's way worse on social media platforms like Twitter, where just 0.1% of images posted on Twitter include alt text. So let's make today the perfect time to master your alt text writing technique.


What's up, it's Jamal, and welcome back to the channel. If you want to get your alt text technique looking fit and feisty, be sure to check out the SEO audit kit down in the description below, that will help you make dozens of incremental gains and search. Image alt text works by adding a text tag to the HTML code of an image embedded on a website. The user doesn't see this invisible text on your site, but search engine bots see the tags on the back end and use the info to help match your page with whatever users are looking for. Better tagging equals higher search ranking.


And there's another way that image alt text can increase your organic traffic. Not only is alt text good for SEO, it's essential for users with visual impairments. The World Health Organization estimates that there are 285 million people worldwide who require screen readers to access the web due to some disability. By not including alt text on your website, you're effectively leaving out millions of potential customers. So I think we all see the advantages of using alt image text, and I wanna make sure you write the text that delivers the best results.


So the first thing you want to make sure you don't do is stuff your keywords into fragmented sentences. It doesn't add enough context, and actually adds too much fluff to the image. It's actually bad to do this because it makes it hard for Google to understand how the image relates to the rest of the webpage, then will result in making it harder for the image to actually rank. What you want to do is make the alt text sentence cohesive, so that it makes it easier for Google to understand with the image.


When you're writing this alt text, you also want to be detailed and descriptive in a way that is very specific. For example, if you were to add alt text to this image, you might think of writing, "Baseball player hitting a ball at a baseball field." Yes, that's descriptive, but it's not specific. So instead, you want to get more specific with your alt text. A good example of this is to add the player's name, what team he's on, and what park he's at. "David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox batting from home plate at Fenway Park." Now that, mwah, is some delicious, great, and specific alt text that also adds a ton of context.


Overall, make sure you don't stuff keywords, use them sparingly, or you might trigger spam filters. Don't repeat yourself if multiple images or captions tell the same information. Don't add alt text to non-essential or decorative images, don't be vague and non-specific, and finally, don't write "picture of" or "image of" at the beginning of your descriptions. Google knows it's an image already. Smart little guy, you know what I'm saying?


So now that you can write excellent image alt text, I want to spend the last few minutes of this video showing you how to add it to your website and social media postings. Now every CMS is going to be a little bit different, but as a general rule, there's always a way to add alt text when uploading an image. Let's jump into the HubSpot CMS. (upbeat music) So here we are in the HubSpot CMS, and we are going to navigate over to marketing, website, website pages. And you'll see here that we have a few website pages already set up, and if I were to go ahead and hit edit, we'll see that on this page, wow, we already have some neat-looking images and stuff, which is always a good time.


If I'm gonna click onto one of these image modules, you'll see that already, the CMS has an alt text field that you can populate with whatever you want, so maybe in this case, we could write something along the lines of "happy girl gestures towards laptop on orange background," and then hit save. And if we wanted that to then be published to our webpage, which is already live, we would hit update, and it would go live. If your CMS doesn't quite look like this, well consider getting the HubSpot CMS, 'cause we make things very, very, very easy. You can get started for free.


Like we already mentioned, Twitter has been heavily promoting the alt text feature. When you upload the image you plan on using, look for the alt button in the lower corner, then type in your description before tweeting it out. Facebook is similar, select the image you want to add to your post, then tap the three dots, select edit alt text, then type your description. Unlike Twitter, Facebook actually allows you to edit your alt text after the image has been uploaded, just look for those same three dots. Adding alt text is a little bit trickier on Instagram, but you'll find it under advanced setting, write alt text.


And LinkedIn auto-selects the alt text tool right at the bottom of the screen when you select an image to post. No matter what platform you're on, creating high-quality alt image text is an effective way to make your content more searchable, and it makes your content more accessible for those with disabilities, which I think we can all agree is an excellent thing to do.


To find more easy ways to optimize your site for SEO, don't forget to download the free SEO audit kit down in the description. We're getting you looking fit and feisty, you know what I'm saying? Because every little SEO upgrade to your site can really pay off in the battle for ranking on search engine algorithms. And check out more videos on our SEO success strategies playlist to optimize every part of your online marketing. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm about to go alt it up. You know what I'm saying? And I'm sure you're thinking yourself, "Jamal, what does that mean?" Yeah, good, that's right where I watch you. I'll see you next time. (upbeat music)


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