Alt text vs. title. Do meta tags matter? What’s the difference? Well whenever you add a new image to your site then you should think about adding both alt text and even an image title for it. WordPress makes it easy to add both of these whenever you add a new image to a post, but these can be easily added if you’re working with code, as well. Many webmasters don’t recognize the difference between the two and oftentimes will use the same text for both. So what’s the difference?
Alt Text Vs. Title
First off, the image title refers to the title of the image (duh).
This is more of an aesthetic addition for your visitors because in many browsers, Firefox being one of them, when you hover over your image it will show your chosen text.
Conversely, alt text is more about what the search engines care about and use to identify your image.
For this reason, you should use your keywords as your alt text as this can bring you additional traffic for that keyword down the road.
Visitors can benefit from your alt text, as well. If your images on your site fail to load or perhaps your visitor has images turned off in their own preferences, then the alt text will appear in the image’s stead so that your visitors can still get a good idea of what was meant to display, otherwise the space in which your image was supposed to show will appear completely blank.
Internet Explorer almost exclusively uses alt text because when you hover over an image, it ignores the title and displays the alt text.
Bottom line: If you have to choose one, go with adding optimized alt text as it’s what Google focuses on when trying to figure out what an image is, plus it’s helpful for your visitors, as well. You don’t have to choose just one, though, so use both of them with varying but relevant text to provide the best possible experience to everyone and everything which visits your site.