If you are building or scaling your business, your website is one of your most powerful assets. It’s your digital storefront, your branding hub, and often the first impression you make on potential customers. And in that landscape, alt text is one of those details that can either elevate your brand visibility or leave opportunities on the table.

In this article, we’ll unpack what alt text is, why it matters, and how businesses can leverage it to maximize both accessibility and SEO. By the end, you’ll see how a few words of thoughtful description can help you win more traffic, trust, and conversions.

What Exactly Is Alt Text?

Alt text — short for alternative text — is the written description added to images on a webpage. Its primary purpose is to provide context when the image cannot be displayed or when a visitor is using a screen reader. But beyond accessibility, alt text plays a huge role in how search engines understand your content.

Here’s something that might blow your mind: Google’s sophisticated AI still can’t perfectly understand images without textual context. Search engines are also blind in a way without alt-text. While they can crawl and index your written words, they, however, can’t “see” your images. Without alt text, that valuable image content remains invisible to them. By adding descriptive alt text, you essentially translate your images into searchable language that boosts your overall SEO.

So while it may seem like a small technical detail, alt text is really a strategic tool.

Why Should I Care About Alt Text?

Here is why you should care :

Accessibility Builds Trust and Loyalty

Inclusivity is no longer optional. Many potential customers rely on screen readers due to visual impairments. If your website is missing alt text, you’re excluding a portion of your audience. By simply writing clear descriptions for your images, you show empathy and respect. And that builds loyalty.

 Alt Text Fuels Your SEO

Search engines can’t interpret images the way humans can. By writing optimized alt text, you’re essentially whispering in Google’s ear: “Here’s what this picture is about.” This extra context can help your pages rank higher, especially when your alt text includes relevant keywords naturally.

For entrepreneurs, this is free organic traffic you can’t afford to miss. Every visitor who finds you through search is one step closer to becoming a customer.

 Improves User Experience Beyond the Screen

Technical failures happen more than you think. Sometimes images don’t load. Maybe the user has a slow internet connection. Perhaps your image hosting service is experiencing technical difficulties. Sometimes corporate firewalls block certain image types or external resources. In mobile environments with limited data plans, users might disable image loading entirely to conserve bandwidth.

When that happens, alt text ensures users still understand the context. Instead of being confused by a blank square, they still get the full story.

In other words, alt text acts as your safety net. It guarantees your content communicates effectively even when technology fails.

Legal Compliance and Avoiding Risk

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide have some form of vision impairment. That’s roughly one in four people on this planet.

In many regions, there are accessibility laws in place. These laws require websites to be usable by people with disabilities. Failing to be compliant can put a business at legal risk.

In 2023 alone, there were over 4,000 website accessibility lawsuits filed in the United States. That’s more than ten lawsuits every single day. Companies like Target, Netflix, and Domino‘s have faced high-profile lawsuits specifically related to website accessibility issues. Domino’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

These lawsuits are completely preventable. Simply adding alt text is one of the easiest ways to safeguard your business and stay compliant with regulations.

Most startups and small businesses with limited funds do not have the luxury of paying hefty settlements, so as site owners, it is best to get this remedy as soon as possible.

How to Write Effective Alt Text

Now that you know why it matters, let’s talk about how to write alt text that actually works.

 Be Descriptive, Not Robotic

Instead of writing something vague like “image” or “photo,” describe what the picture shows. For example, instead of:

  “Dog”

  “Golden retriever puppy playing with a red ball in a park”

The second example not only paints a clearer picture for users but also gives search engines more context.

 Keep It Concise

Alt text is not the place for lengthy sentences.

Aim for one short, clear description — usually under 125 characters. Screen readers cut off longer text, so brevity ensures clarity.

 Use Keywords Naturally

If your target keyword fits naturally, use it. For example, if your keyword is “eco-friendly water bottle,” and your image shows that product, your alt text could read:

  “Eco-friendly stainless steel water bottle on a wooden desk”

Avoid keyword stuffing. Forcing phrases like “eco-friendly water bottle” into every image alt text looks spammy and hurts your SEO.

 Skip Redundancy

You don’t need to write “image of” or “picture of” in your alt text.

Screen readers already announce that it’s an image. Jump straight into the description.

 Prioritize Meaningful Images

Not every single image needs detailed alt text. Decorative elements (like background patterns or design flourishes) can have empty alt attributes (`alt=””`) so they don’t clutter the experience for screen readers. Focus your energy on product images, infographics, charts, and photos that add real value.

Use Cases for Alt Text

So, how do entrepreneurs apply this practically? Let’s look at a few scenarios.

E-commerce Businesses

If you sell products online, alt text is your silent salesperson. Well-written descriptions make your products discoverable in Google Images, which drives buying intent traffic straight to your store.

For example, instead of:

  “Shoes”

  “Women’s black leather ankle boots with side zipper”

That extra detail improves both search visibility and conversion. Despite its simplicity, alt text remains one of the most overlooked aspects of web development.

Content Creators and Coaches

If you publish blogs, webinars, or guides, alt text ensures your visuals (charts, screenshots, promotional graphics) contribute to SEO. It also makes your content more accessible to a broader audience, expanding your reach.

Startups and Small Businesses

When you’re building awareness on a budget, every ounce of organic visibility matters. Alt text is one of the cheapest SEO wins available. It helps your site compete with bigger players who may overlook this detail.

Personal Branding for Entrepreneurs

If you’re building a personal brand through photos, speaking events, or media features, alt text ensures your image-based content contributes to your discoverability. Imagine someone searching for “entrepreneur keynote speaker Singapore” — if your event photo has the right alt text, you could appear.

Common Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make with Alt Text

Despite its simplicity, many entrepreneurs miss the mark. Here are mistakes to avoid:

 Keyword stuffing: Writing alt text like “alt text alt text entrepreneur SEO alt text” doesn’t fool Google.

 Being too vague: “Business image” doesn’t add value.

 Forgetting brand consistency: Use alt text to reinforce your brand voice subtly.

 Ignoring charts and infographics: Data visuals need alt text too, or you lose SEO and accessibility benefits.

Final Thoughts: Don’t Overlook the Small Things

As entrepreneurs, it’s tempting to focus only on the big, flashy strategies — product launches, ad campaigns, scaling operations. But sometimes, it’s the quiet, overlooked details that make the difference between being found and being forgotten.

Alt text may look small on the surface, but its ripple effects touch accessibility, SEO, brand reputation, and even legal compliance. By investing just a few extra minutes to write thoughtful alt text, you’re investing in a better experience for your customers and a stronger foundation for your business.

Remember the 2.2 billion people with disabilities; though they may face visual challenges, they nonetheless represent real people with real purchasing power.

So next time you upload an image, don’t just leave that alt text box blank. Use it as a chance to improve your visibility and show your customers that you care.

It’s often the little things that make the biggest impact or sink a mighty ship. If you want professional help optimizing your digital presence, drop us a note as we specialize in strategies that ensure every detail of your online presence is working for you and not against you, including alt text.

However, many small business websites do not appreciate its importance. In most cases, once a site is done up and published, it is usually assumed that the bulk of the work on the website is done.

One of the things that next need to be worked on is to identify keywords that your target audience would most likely key into a search engine. This is important as it will allow lead search engines to pick up and display your site on a search engine result page (SERP).

Many times website owner publishes content from their perspectives. This is a huge mistake. Writing content that will not be picked up by a search engine is a complete waste of time and effort. It will just be another best-kept secret on the web.

Keyword research is vital. It starts with your target audience in mind. Imagine you are the audience; what are the words he/she would likely type in a search on the web. Take these keywords and gear your content to meeting these keywords. If you can do this, half the battle is already won. Note while choosing a keyword is critical; it, however, doesn’t guarantee you will be rank high on a SERP. There are other considerations like competition, bounce rate, domain authority etc, that finally determine your site’s position on the SERP. We wished too it was that simple.

While keywords are important when crafting your content, it should, however, not be the primary focus. The focus instead should be on producing content that is relevant to the reader than for search engines. Search engines today are smart enough to pick them up.

Unknown to some inexperience content writer or anyone doing SEO for the first time, putting too many keywords or “keyword stuffing” is frowned upon and quickly picked up by search engines. Having the right amount of keywords is essential from being penalized by search engines.

Lastly, keywords also need to be continuously reviewed to make sure it maintains its position or climbs up the SERP.

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Once a site is blacklisted, its presence on search results can be drastically reduced or even removed altogether, cutting off traffic and credibility in an instant. For entrepreneurs, marketers, and content creators, understanding how these blacklists operate is not just a technical concern but a fundamental safeguard for protecting brand reputation.

What makes the issue of a search engine blacklist particularly challenging is that it often happens quietly, without immediate notice to the site owner. Many discover the problem only after experiencing a sharp drop in visitors or receiving alerts from users who encounter warnings before accessing the site.

By learning what triggers these blacklists and how to avoid them, website owners can shield themselves from unnecessary setbacks and maintain the digital trust that drives growth.

Why do search engine blacklist exist?

For a search engine, a good user experience is important. Protecting its users from harmful websites is one such good user experience requirement.

Websites that have been blacklisted will display a strong message such as “This site may be compromised“, or have a red screen enveloping the entire website.

If your website is on a search engines’ blacklist, not only do you lose organic growth, but more importantly, you lose both reputation and goodwill. All goodwill with the current domain will be lost; your website ranking will drastically drop on search engines. The business consequences can be devastating—lost sales, broken trust, and a long road to recovery.

In extreme cases, you might even have to rebrand your business and get a new domain name. All goodwill and organic traffic will be lost and you need to rebuild everything. That takes a lot of effort and time.

You might have to embark on a costly rebranding campaign to inform your audience of your new website.

How do websites get on the search engine’s blacklist?

There are various reasons why a site is blacklisted.  

Blackhat SEO tactics. For the purpose of ranking higher on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP), some SEO specialists might adopt practices to duped them to rank the page higher. Tactics like cloaking, excessive link exchanges are some of them. You can read more of some blackhat SEO tactics.

Spammy website. A site can be spammy due to malware putting out spammy content. This might result in unhappy site visitors and this doesn’t go down well with Google if the site gets discovered.

Website spreading malware. In some instances, your site could be used to download malware to unsuspecting users. Once this is picked up by the search engines, users will be shown a red screen to warn users from proceeding further. Your website will be quarantined and eventually blacklisted.

Website that plagiarizes. If a website is stealing content from other sites and making it it’s own. The artificial intelligence capabilities of the search engine can quickly and easily pick it up. Being blatant about it and you will soon get blacklisted too.

The sad and truthful part is that you might not even know that you have been banned by the search engines.

It has been reported that typically a malware could be residing on a website for 3 to 6 months without the website owner’s knowledge. Things start to surface when either you are notified by your web host or worst still by your customers and potential prospects.

It is not the search engine’s role to remove malicious code. That will fall onto the lap of the website owner. If you have Google Search Console in place, you could get a warning.

Take a proactive approach

Instead of a reactive approach, which is challenging and detrimental, we would recommend a proactive approach – have an alert mechanism, link your site up with Google Search Console, and implement an anti-malware solution.

We believe as a site owner; you should be the “first to know” of anything that is happening on your website (including the presence of malware) instead of the search engines or anyone else. News, especially negative ones, when made public, can be hard to manage and might spin out of control, resulting in negative publicity.

Reputation is priceless. Why risk it?

One way to avoid it is to deploy an alert mechanism. Once an alert is triggered, you can start your own internal investigation and quickly rectify and contain the problem.

Next is to have a good anti-malware solution to nip the problem at the bud. If anti-malware is in place on your site, it would be able to pick up the malware and tackle the malware before it can do its damage.

We can help you to get you ready and avoid trouble with the search engines.

If, however, you are already on the search engine’s blacklist, you can head to Google Search Console to take the necessary actions to remove the malware if any is present. Next, you would need to check on all login credentials and remove infected files manually. Or if you have an uninfected backup, you can restore it. Just confirm there is no malware in the backup.

Once you have taken the preliminary effort to make your website “good” again, you can then initiate a removal request through Google Search Console. These might take days.

Let us know if you need any assistance in the above area.

If done well, SEM could establish you as an authority in your niche, and eventually, bring more business for you.

For starters, in this post, we will limit our content creation to writing for a blog. It is more involved than most might think.

In the physical offline world, you just need to create a story fit for human consumption. However, a post in the online world, have also to satisfy search engine ranking criteria, and fend off competition.

On the web, there are many blogs with similar content. Besides paying for ads, how can you rise above the crowd? While ranking higher in a Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is essential. However, we shouldn’t be too fixated on ranking top of the list. The holy grail is the click through to your website, this is what we should be actually focussing on.

Let’s go back to basics and understand how a customer’s purchase journey. From there, we can get some clue as to how we can get them to visit our website.

When a user searches on a particular topic, many results will appear on the SERP.

Assuming you are one of the links that appear on the page, how would you get the user to click on the link that leads back to your page? That is the first hurdle you need to overcome. If the link is not clicked, it doesn’t really matter how good the article, it is not going to be read by that web surfer.

Fortunately, there is more than one way to increase the likelihood of that click happening. In this post, we will confine ourselves to optimizing the content for that precious click.

The first step is to brainstorm on some keywords and key phrases that your visitor would likely most likely input in the search engine bar.

With the keyword list, you have generated, you next check the volume and competitiveness of each keyword or phrase.

Once you have narrowed down to a few keywords, you go back to the search engine and enter your keywords.

On the search engine results page (SERP), Ignore the results from paid Ads, you need to look at the top listed sites, and understand why they are ranked higher?

After reviewing your competitive results, you would be able to craft a more persuasive, captivating headline that would pique the visitor’s interest to want to click it.

Once you get that precious click, you want to look at providing useful, relevant content. The content not only has to be human friendly but also search engine friendly. The latter is what we termed as on-page SEO.

In the next paragraph, we will look in detail where being friendly entails from the content perspective.

Human friendly

By being human friendly, your article has to be easy to read. As a baseline, your blog post needs to be appropriately structured. There must be a good flow and proper use of English.

Spelling errors should be kept at a minimum or ideally non-existent. These errors could negatively impact the credibility of the author.

Using synonyms will prevent your post from sounding repetitive.

Using similes will make your words be more vivid and come alive.

Using metaphors will make complex concepts easier to grasp.

Just like in a mini-series, deploying appropriate hooks in your content will keep your audience reading on.

Whenever possible, having mixed content formats (i.e., using images, videos, infographics) will make your post more interesting for your audience.

Before you launch that post, there are several things you need to check, they would be grammar, spelling errors, and plagiarism.

Remember, at the end of the day, if your blog is not human friendly, your visitor would quickly abandon your site and head for another website, potentially a competitive one.

Search engine friendly

If your website is not search engine friendly, your ranking on search engines will slowly drop. This, in turn, will cause your organic traffic to be reduced to a trickle.

There are over 200+ ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. Some are more important than others.

Using the right keyword and strategically placing them in your post is one ranking factor.

However, you must not overdo it with keywords as overstuffing your post with them can get you penalized and even blacklisted by the search engines. You definitely don’t want that to happen to your site.

Using related keywords will allow search engines to better understand the context of the post, and display the page accordingly.

Take, for example, someone is interested in the animated movie – “Cars”, he will type the word “cars” in the search bar. If the website doesn’t have any related keywords to put the move “cars” in the context of the animation movie, the search engine would most likely return a page on automobiles (i.e., car models, car brands, car dealership, etc.). This is not what the user would want. Hence as a website/blog owner, you need to inject related keywords to help the search engine what your site is all about.

The length of the posts also plays a part in influencing search result pages. Your various posts need to have the appropriate length. A post of 300 words would be an excellent baseline to start.

While the list above is not exhaustive. You can now better appreciate the various steps that go into creating a human and search engine friendly post.

Remember, all your readers have choices and their arrival on your page is cerntainly not entirely by chance.

You have worked hard (i.e., doing your research to create compelling headlines) to get your visitor onto your page. You reward your reader with quality content, and hopefully, in return, they can reward you by becoming a fan of your webpage.

All of this can only happened through well-conceived planning and preparation.

With can help you with your content creation, shall we have a conversation soon? Contact us today!

Google has been focusing on speed as a ranking factor for the last eight years.

In Jan 2018, Google formally announced that it would be updating its speed update algorithm sometime in mid-2018. This update will be a significant one. This early announcement gives website owners some heads up to start taking actions to improve their site downloading speed.

Why Is Google doing this?

The reason that Google is making this speed update is that speed matters to a user, especially as more and more users are surfing on mobile devices, which typically has a slower connection compared to desktops.

The user’s patience for a slow downloading site is waning. If a website takes too long to download, they merely move on to another website. Users expect to move through a brand’s site and pages at lightning speed. A web page that loads quickly will increase user satisfaction.

A key ranking factor

One of Google search’s key ranking factors is a site’s download speed.

So what does this mean to you, a website owner?

If your site is not downloading fast enough, visitors will abandon your site and move on to another. In time, your ranking on Google search engine page results will drop.

If your competitor’s webpages are downloading faster than yours, your site will rank lower than theirs. Hence you can see, speed matters.

What contributes to a website download speed?

Many factors determine the performance of a website.  They generally fall into two parts – front-end and back-end.

Front-end would refer to the webpages and all its associated resources, as rendered by a browser. The components on the front-end  that has an impact on the loading time would include the

• HTML codes

• CSS files

• JavaScript

• media  sizes (images, video, etc.) and

• the use of caching

• the use of redirects

The back-end would refer to the webserver delivering the page to your browser. Below are some of the

• location of the webserver,

• connection speed,

• PHP version,

• the number of HTTP requests etc.

Optimizing both front-end and back-end is critical in achieving optimal website performance and ranking higher on search engine result pages.

Let’s have a conversation if you would like to do a web page speed audit or improve your website speed.

However, there are some sensitive pages on a website that we recommend site owners not allow search engines to index and display as it could pose a security breach. One such weblink would be our Content Management System (CMS) login page.

Should a hacker finds out the link to your CMS login, he/she could try to brute force themselves into your CMS and take control of your website.

Fortunately, there is a way to ‘tell’ the search engines not to display these sensitive pages by way of a file, robots.txt. In the file, you can list the webpages you do not want search engines to index and make it discoverable.

The robots.txt file is essential to search engines too. A crawler bot from a search engine while indexing your website will also look for the robots.txt file on your site. They will take a peek into it, to see if there is any website for them to avoid displaying. If there is nothing in the robots.txt, they will, by default, make all pages discoverable.

Displaying a sensitive page to the wrong audience (i.e., hacker) could result in a hacker hacking into it, leading to a compromised site, something no human or search engine wants.

Hence search engines need your help to keep the Internet a safer place. They need site owners to specifically list webpages that they do not wish to be displayed.

Do reach out to us if you need any assistance in this area.

The primary mission of the search engine is to create a good user experience for those who use their search capabilities. To achieve a satisfying experience, a search engine has to consider many factors.

However, these factors can be broken down into three broad categories.

Relevant content

Long before Google, there were already many other search engines on the Internet. Search engines like Alta Vista, ask Jeeves, Excite, etc. were household names back then lie how Google is today. However, while these companies understood the importance of search engines on the Internet, they did not understand the power of quality relevant content. Many a time, during those days, when you search on these platforms, the results that come back were disappointing.

Hence when a search engine (i.e., Google) that provided more relevant content came along, users migrated to the new platform. Users want quality relatable results. Being able to provide appropriate quality results is vital. If you do it right, your visitors will come.

Quality results, in turn, depend on the right keywords and relevant content. With good content, visitors will spend more time on the webpage, and they might even share the page out. These actions are signals to search engines that the webpage has some relevance to the user and potential users.

Download speed

With more and more users using their mobile users to surf the Internet on the go, download speed becomes increasingly important.

Download speed over mobile devices is typically slower compared to devices physically connected (i.e.,LAN) to the Internet. With the already slow connection, any webpage that adds to the slowness of the download will irk the user. This slow download would constitute a poor experience in the eyes of search engines. The website will be penalized by being ranked lower to a comparatively faster website. Hence, optimizing a website for faster download is critical.

It is imperative to check on your website download speed from time to time, especially when adding something new to it. The newly added image, functionality, may impact your site download performance.

Secure website

As cybercriminal activities intensify, search engines are increasingly putting more emphasis on website security. A new, more secure transmission protocol emerged because of this concern – HTTPS. With HTTPS in place, information that is transmitted between the web server and the client desktop or device is made more secure through encryption. Sites that run the HTTPS protocol have their domain name preceded by HTTPS in their URL.

In 2018, search engines like Google took it a step further by displaying a little padlock beside the URL of the website. Google even went further by providing warnings of unsecured webpages they are about to visit, to its users.

While doing all of the above three things doesn’t guarantee you will appear on the first page on any search engine result page, it will, however, provide you with the assurance that you are in line with the search engines’ mandate.

With over 100+ ranking factors to optimize, getting the above right will serve as a good foundation for your optimization effort to rank higher within the search engines.