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Like Meta tags, Alt Text tags were also an important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) till few years ago. Now days the importance of Alt tags have been diminished.

Alt Text tags are meant for providing alternate text to the images, for visually impaired surfers. Stuffing keywords does not help them as they will be stuck in reading the same thing again and again, if keywords ate stuffed in all the alt tags on the page. For them, it will be keyword spamming. Probably this is the reason why all major search engines have started ignoring Alt Tags.

What does this mean?

Alt Text tags should be used for the purpose of representation of image. This was the purpose of their creation so they should be used for the same. Never try to SPAM through alt tags, in fact you can use 2-3 instances of your primary keywords in Alt Text tags but try to avoid using more than that. Even W3C highly recommends the usage of ALT Tags to describe images. Do not use the text which is irrelevant to the image. If you are trying to fool search engine by excessive usage of keywords in Alt tags, then you are into “Black Hat” practice. Better to avoid this scenario as this will adversely affect your rankings if it backfires.

Final word

Rankings are determined by many factors and Alt Text is just one of them. Focus on this but do not try to use it excessively, instead use a combination of all other factors which will definitely increase your rankings.