BIALTY - Bulk Image Alt Text (Alt tag, Alt Attribute) with Yoast SEO + WooCommercebyPagup

A quick overview

Bialty automatically adds ALT TEXTs to your images from page/article/product titles (with Woocommerce for online store) or Yoast’s Focus Keywords, separately or combined (depending on your needs). BIALTY also allows, via a Post META Box, manual customization on your pages, with the use of ALT TEXTs other than those used with Yoast or page titles.

BIALTY works in automatic mode. Once installed, it will be active on all pages of your site, retroactively and for future content. You no longer have to think about your Alt Texts.

Also compatible with: TinyMCE, Page Builder by SiteOrigin, Elementor Page Builder, Gutenberg and more…

SUPPORTED IN 6 LANGUAGES

BIALTY plugins are translated and available in: English, French – Français, Russian –Руссɤɢɣ, Portuguese – Português, Spanish – Español, German – Deutsch

Why should you optimize your image Alt Texts? Because more than 20% of search queries are made on Google Images. Check here

Alternate text (Alt text) is a text description that can be added to an image’s HTML tag on a Web page. It is used when the image in the Web page cannot be displayed, in which case the Alt text is shown instead. It is also displayed when a user mouses over the image.

Unfortunately, the ALT attribute is a critical step that is often overlooked.

Have you ever been in the situation where you have hundreds or thousands of images on your website without any alt tags? You know by definition that it will hurt your Google ranking in some way, especially when YOAST SEO keeps reminding you that « All the images on this page do not contain ALT attributes with the focus keyword ». This can be a lost opportunity for better rankings on search engines.

Of course, you could add these alts tags manually (and spend dozens of hours doing it) or use other WordPress plugins auto-adding the product/page/post title or image name/title as ALT texts (with « _ » which are not SEO-friendly, by the way), but they still won’t be the best ALT attributes to be added to your images and Yoast will keep displaying this orange/red spot reminding you that you HAVE NOT DONE the job as you should. And for good reason, because Alt tags strengthen the message of your articles with search engine spiders (which cannot determine the content of images and must rely on Alt text to determine their contents) and improves the accessibility of your website.

BIALTY is a time-saver because it uses this « Focus Keyword » determined (by you) when optimizing your page/post/product with YOAST SEO (and optionally the page title) as ALT texts for all images contained on this page/post/product. Once your keyword is added in the « Focus keyword » field, after saving your settings, it will add it automatically to the image’s HTML tags of your page : . Simple & efficient …

For your information, Google’s article about images has a heading “Create great alt text”. This is no coincidence because Google places a relatively high value on alt text to determine not only what is on the image but also the topic of the surrounding text.
(https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en )

How does it work?

Install BIALTY on your website, select your preferred option either « Only YOAST Focus Keyword » or « YOAST Focus Keyword + Page/post/product title », after saving, BIALTY will add ALT Texts to all images, on each page, according to your optimization.

Then, simply forget about it …

Best practices?

The text (keyword) should be kept short to maximize its impact. Shorter alt texts (thus keywords) are also more likely to be indexed by Google and the other major online search engines in a more efficient manner (please read our FAQ for more info)

What purpose do alt tags serve?

Search engines and other crawler bots cannot interpret/understand images, but images can play a crucial part in how people interpret a particular web page. Alt text solve for this by providing text which is read by the search engines.

When Google bot or other search engine crawlers inspect a page, images with properly formatted alt text contribute to how the page is indexed and where it ranks on SERP.

Alt text or Alt tag ?

When you think of image alt text, the term that may immediately come to mind is “alt tag”. Alt tag is actually a misnomer and doesn’t exist at all. Because alt text, or alternative text, is the alternate text attribute of the image tag.

This is where communication in the SEO world can get dicey, because it may be known as one thing that just about everyone knows what an alt tag is, but in reality, it is entirely different.

Alternative text (or Alt text) is mainly used by screen readers for the blind to decipher what an image is about. It lets you specify an image description that is fed through an audio-based prompter that tells blind people what is currently on the page as they are scrolling through the page.

According to W3C Accessibility Guidelines, for code to be considered W3C-valid, it is important to include both image alt text and image title text in the image for important images on the page.

Why is Alt Text Important?

Google’s article about images has a heading “Use descriptive alt text”. This is no coincidence because Google places a relatively high value on alt text to determine not only what is on the image but also how it relates to the surrounding text.

Using alt text (or Alt attribute) on your images can make for a better user experience, but it may also help earn you both explicit and implicit SEO benefits. Along with implementing image title and file naming best practices, including alt attribute will also contribute to image SEO.

Today, Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) deliver just as many image results as they do text-based results. So, one of the most important things image alt text can do for you is turn your images into hyperlinked search results — giving your website yet another way to receive organic visitors.

While search engine image recognition technology has vastly improved over the years, search crawlers still can’t “see” the images on a website page like we can, so it’s not wise to leave the interpretation solely in their hands. If they don’t understand, or get it wrong, it’s possible you could either rank for unintended keywords or miss out on ranking altogether.

About Google’s Image Recommendations ?

To boost your content’s visibility in Google Images, focus on the user by providing a great user experience: make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Here are some tips:

• Provide good context: Make sure that your visual content is relevant to the topic of the page. We suggest that you display images only where they add original value to the page. We particularly discourage pages where neither the images or the text are original content.

• Optimize placement: Whenever possible, place images near relevant text. When it makes sense, consider placing the most important image near the top of the page.

• Don’t embed important text inside images: Avoid embedding text in images, especially important text elements like page headings and menu items, because not all users can access them (and page translation tools won’t work on images). To ensure maximum accessibility of your content, keep text in HTML, provide alt text for images.

• Create informative and high quality sites: Good content on your webpage is just as important as visual content for Google Images – it provides context and makes the result more actionable. Page content may be used to generate a text snippet for the image, and Google considers the page content quality when ranking images.

• Create device-friendly sites: Users search on Google Images more from mobile than on desktop. For this reason, it is important that you design your site for all device types and sizes. Use the mobile friendly testing tool to test how well your pages work on mobile devices, and get feedback on what needs to be fixed.

• Create good URL structure for your images: Google uses the URL path as well as the file name to help it understand your images. Consider organizing your image content so that URLs are constructed logically.

PS: Pagup recommends Site kit by Google plugin for insights & SEO performance.