If you use the Blogger Platform to host your blog, they make adding Image Properties very simple. It's commonly called the Alt Attribute or the Alt Tag. This tutorial will explain what the Alt Attribute is and how to add it to your images in Blogger.
The alt attribute is used as an alternative to the image. If someone visiting your site has their images turned off or blocked in their browser, they would use the image alt attribute to understand what was being displayed. The Alt Text would be displayed instead of the image. Individuals who are seeing impaired or blind often use screen reading software to listen to websites. This attribute would come in very handy to them as well, because they would hear the Alt Text.
There is also the fact of the alt attribute contributing to your sites Search Engine Optimization. (SEO) When the Google Image Bots crawl your site, they can't see the images, they read the image properties. If you want your images to appear within the correct search results, then the proper use of these properties is needed.
Let's look at the two options Blogger gives you. When you add an image to your post, you will see a menu below with the word "Properties". Clicking on "Properties" will bring open a window with two sections:
1. Title Text
2. Alt Text
Title Text is what your readers will see if they were to hover their mouse over the image. It is the title of the image.
Alt Text is the "alternate text" that is shown in the screen reader software and to the image bots and crawlers.
With the alt text, there are many variances out there.
<img src="IMAGE NAME.JPG." width="150" height"20" border="0" alt=IMAGE DESCRIPTION">
Or
<img src="IMAGENAME.GIF" width="20" height="15" alt="IMAGE DESCRIPTION">
Or
<img src="IMAGENAME.GIF" alt="IMAGE DESCRIPTION">
Or
<img src="DIRECT IMAGE URL" alt="IMAGE DESCRIPTION">
A couple of things to keep in mind is if your image is jpg, gif or png, you would need to change it to correspond with the image and of course, you will need to edit the capitalized area. The src and alt attributes are required information. The width, height and border attributes are optional.
The best advice I can give with the image description is keep it short and to the point. Think about it like this, if you were unable to see the image, which keywords would best describe it to you. If you have a picture of blue, four door vehicle that has been in an accident, you wouldn't put the description as that, you could just put vehicle accident.
I found a great video on the Official Google Webmaster Blog explaining it a bit further. You can copy and paste it into your browser.
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-alt-attributes-smartly.html
If Google suggests doing it a certain way, who are we to argue?
Do you use the image alt attribute? If so, what method above do you use?
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