The image alt tag and anchor text links are very important to Google

The image alt tag and anchor text links are very important to Google

In a recent response on Twitter John Mueller Webmaster, Trends Analyst at Google said and commented on image alt tag and anchor text links saying, and I quote:

"I wouldn't leave it out if you can avoid it"

This shows, yet again that Google puts a lot of weight on use having alt tags based keywords on every image on our website as well as generally use text anchor based links. Sometimes we take Google and its crawlers for granted. They aren't as smart as we think they are and a lot of Google robots still look and analyze the little things like alt tags and anchor texts.

I'm not saying abuse this implementation and focus on over optimization and keyword stuffing, I'm just saying that most webmasters out there ignore alt tag implementation for their images as well as forget to add anchor text to links.

You need to help Google understand what you are publishing, you don't need to "optimize" and stuff your keywords every time you get the opportunity, just be sincere in your alt description as well as your anchor text and everything should be alright in the long run.

Let's say you have around 1k images on your website, if every image has an alt tag, I assure you that your website will get a decent amount of traffic just from Google Image Search, even if your alt tag doesn't always reflect some relevant keyword to your niche.
sincere