Captions and alt texts: needed or not?

[Handel]

I'd like to get your opinion about going out with images in a magazine style website. So far, I do 3 things with images: 1) rename files to represent what's in the picture, 2) write captions 3) write alternative texts. All three slightly differ. Question: does this all worth the effort?

It takes time. I managed to streamline the process a bit: I edit a .CSV file on the folder, create all the descriptions there, then using exiftool apply all this to each file's property fields. Uppon file upload Caption, Description and Alt text fill up automatically in WP for each image. So at least I don't have to go over each individual file in WP. But that still takes time.

If you think its worth the effort, I'll try to pass this to my authors as a part of content creation or as a separate task to a VA (still have to figure out whichever is better).

 

[Steve Brownlie]

I spoke to the head of SEO at a pretty huge news publisher and he swore that doing all three of those things and having them be unique was useful over the significant sample they monitor. I wasn't supplied with the specific results of his testing, though.

 

[turbin3]

Yeah, do it. It's worthwhile, and better yet, it's a fire and forget effort for the most part. Over the long term, it'll give you the potential for a lot of peripheral rankings, traffic, and other things. I still, to this day, will not understand why the majority of people don't even bother. It takes little time. It's so stupid easy to rank an image on Google Images, still, to this day. Go out and GET it!

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'd do it manually each time on as many as two to 25 images per post. Each piece of content only needs to be created once and it's out there working for you forever after that.

I can't count the number of times I've ranked in the top whatever on Google Images and gotten a consistent flow of traffic from it, just from doing these things.

Also, it's a fantastic way of sending on-page signals for long-tails that you may not be targeting exclusively in the post. It helps sculpts the topic of the post.

I don't worry about captions though. I use them when I want and don't worry about an SEO impact, but a user-action manipulation. Nobody can resist reading captions, so I don't want to waste them on SEO when I can hook them into continuing to read, inject some humor in a dry article, or use a call-to-action.