New Image SEO Tool

February 1, 2010 / 18 Comments

This new tool checks images and alt text on a web page to see how well it can be “seen” by search engines.

One Google guidelines states…

Make sure that your title elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

My new free image SEO tool lets a user enter a url and check how well images are following the image ALT part of this guideline.

Image SEO Tool

Once you enter a webpage and click “go” this tool will…

  • Show the images of that page.
  • Display the ALT text associated with each image.
  • Notes for each image about how well it is following Google guidelines.

Here is what the tool results looks like…

To check your web page images go to the Image SEO Tool.

How are scores assigned? / How does it know how well the guideline is being followed?
I have seen some tools that tell you if an image has ALT text or not, but I have never encountered a tool that examined the ALT text itself.

So I built this tool which does.

This tools not only sees if ALT text is present, it also examines the ALT text and counts the amount of words contained in that ALT text.

strong, handsome man thinkingI thought about it, and the amount of words does tell us alot.

Scores are based on the amount of words contained in the ALT text. Here are some examples:

  • If an image has no ALT text (o words) then the image is not following the guideline.
  • If an image has 100 words in the ALT text it is likely spamming or keyword stuffing
  • If an image has only one word it is likely not “descriptive”. The Google guideline states it should be descriptive.

I am creating free SEO tools which help a webmaster determine if they are following the Google webmaster guidelines. This and other new (and old) SEO tools having to do with Google will be on my webmaster tools page on feedthebot.com, so you might want to check that page every once in awhile.

Update: Some people reported bugs, they have been fixed. Specifically:
-some cases where images were being reported as having alt text when they did not was fixed (this was happening when people used alt=”" )
-dashes and characters are no longer counted as a word (in fact one letter words are not being counted either)
- I changed some of the conditions so that it is more acceptable to show more words (I went up to 15 words before giving a red “x” and saying “could be seen as spam”)

Posted in: google guidelines, seo, SEO tools

18 Comments

  1. Nick @ Brick Marketing
    February 2, 2010 at 3:13 am /

    Thanks for sharing information about the new image tool to help with the on site optimization process. I have never seen anything like this, so I plan to check this out and test it. Generally speaking, as a best practice, when we optimize we write an image tag that fits will naturally within the existing content and contributes to the visitor experience.

  2. Alaev
    February 2, 2010 at 11:57 am /

    Thanks. Useful tool. Just check my own blog and find “nonalted” images.

  3. Maxtec Solutions
    February 3, 2010 at 7:36 am /

    Thanks for the tool. I used it to see if my website images are missing something. And then I found out that there really is an issue on its images. Most of website images have no alt texts.

  4. George
    February 3, 2010 at 9:04 am /

    This toll is look something different from other regular seo tools.Very useful when you want some information from particular image.Now,i will use it for make my personal blogs.

  5. Bharat
    February 10, 2010 at 11:15 pm /

    Thanks for the tools this tools something different

  6. Richard A. Lewis
    July 14, 2010 at 12:53 pm /

    Clever tool. I know it will be helpful for a lot of people who fail to use alt tags.

  7. Nick Trendov
    August 5, 2010 at 5:18 pm /

    Found you via Twitter, and the tools sounds cool.

    We can add a semantic twist to the image tags to make it really attractive to the spiders. Our focus is semantic seo background here http://isemanticblog.wordpress.com or http://www.twitter.com/speedsynch

    Cheers,
    Nick

  8. Steven Aschenbrener
    August 26, 2010 at 7:15 pm /

    Hey man how do I add this article to my site?

  9. Irmgard Bichel
    September 21, 2010 at 5:24 pm /

    I have followed your blog for three days and I must say that I begin to love your message. How do I subscribe to your blog now?

  10. Bec
    November 30, 2010 at 9:04 pm /

    Great tool – I realised that most of my images didn’t have any alt text. I’m making the most of your tool now!

  11. dheepanseo
    March 25, 2011 at 2:10 am /

    useful information thanks

  13. SEOValley
    August 18, 2011 at 3:13 am /

    it is the great image of seo tool i like it seo tool image

  14. Spencer Haley
    August 24, 2011 at 12:37 pm /

    I like this tool very much. Just helped me SEO my site a little better. I totally blasted it on facebook.

  15. nichesuite
    November 15, 2011 at 11:33 pm /

    thanks for sharing for the tools

  16. Crossshore Solutions
    November 25, 2011 at 12:35 am /

    Social Shop Creation offers best facebook shop application Solutions with innovative social sharing features to increase your sells of online shopping carts inexpensively. Begin Social Selling rather pushing with Social Shop Creation.

  17. Ariko D' Hagana
    November 26, 2011 at 11:19 am /

    Hi all…

    Hi SEOISH..,
    I really really thank You for sharing this article and tool. It’s very Useful & Helpful :)

    Again Thanks

  18. john
    May 24, 2012 at 7:41 am /

    this site is very good