Adding short photo descriptions brought a reader free image traffic

Adding short photo descriptions brought a reader free image traffic

A craft blogger had hundreds of project photos but got almost no visitors from Google Images. The reason: her photos had no 'alt text'.

Alt text is a short written description of a picture. It helps blind readers using screen-readers, and it tells Google what the image shows, since Google can't truly 'see' a photo.

What she did over two evenings:
— Opened each of her top 60 images in the media library.
— Wrote a plain description in the 'Alt text' box, like 'blue knitted baby hat with pom-pom'.

Over the next three months, visitors from Google Images grew from near zero to about 400 a month, a free new stream.

In plain words: describing your photos in plain words helps both blind readers and search engines, and can quietly pull in new visitors.