Alt Text, Site Speed, and What Search Crawlers Actually Skip Over

One of the more clarifying realizations I had about SEO was this: search engine crawlers are essentially blind. They read text. Everything else — images, video, interactive elements, certain types of JavaScript — either requires workarounds or gets skipped entirely. Building pages with this in mind is different from building pages for a human reader, and understanding the difference changed how I structure content.

Keywords in Strategic Locations, Not Just Body Text

Crawlers weight different locations on a page differently. The title tag carries the most weight. The first paragraph gets meaningful weight. Subheadings (h2, h3) are read and ranked. Body text after the first few hundred words carries progressively less weight per word. This doesn't mean your endings don't matter — they do for humans, and human engagement signals feed back into rankings. But it does mean your primary keyword should appear in the title and early in the first paragraph, not buried on page two of a long article.

Anchor text in links also carries weight. A internal linking plugin that tracks your existing anchor text distribution helps ensure you're not under-using or over-using any single phrase as an anchor.

What Crawlers Can't Read: Images Without Alt Text

A search engine crawler encounters an image tag and sees: a filename and whatever you put in the alt attribute. If the filename is "DSC00481.jpg" and the alt text is empty, the crawler gets nothing from that image. If the filename is "compact-wireless-keyboard.jpg" and the alt text says "slim bluetooth keyboard on wooden desk," the crawler gets two useful data points about what that page covers.

Alt text also serves accessibility purposes — screen readers use it. Writing descriptive alt text is both good SEO and good practice. I use a bulk image renaming tool when I'm importing a batch of product images to rename them all before upload rather than fixing alt text individually afterward.

Site Speed Is a Real Ranking Factor

Google has been explicit about this for years. A page that loads in 2 seconds ranks better than an identical page that loads in 6 seconds, all else equal. For most content sites, the biggest drag is images — uncompressed, oversized files that take time to download. After that it's usually render-blocking JavaScript and CSS loaded in the wrong order.

Running your pages through a website speed test is worth doing quarterly. The report will tell you specifically what's slowing you down. Addressing the top two or three items usually recovers most of the performance. A full engineering overhaul is rarely necessary unless you're dealing with a particularly slow host or very large image libraries.

The Meta Description Doesn't Rank — But It Sells the Click

Meta descriptions are not used as a direct ranking signal by major search engines. But they appear under your title in search results and directly influence whether someone clicks your result. A meta description that reads like a useful preview — specific, relevant, honest — outperforms a generic one in click-through rate, and click-through rate does feed into rankings indirectly.

Keep meta descriptions under 155-160 characters. Write them last, after you know what the article actually covers. Don't copy the first sentence of the article — write something that gives a distinct, enticing reason to click.

What I'd Skip

I'd skip investing in images you can't compress. A visually stunning image that adds 400KB to your page load might cost you more ranking than it contributes in quality signals. I've seen content creators spend real money on custom photography and then wonder why their pages are slow — the answer was always uncompressed files. An image optimizer that runs automatically on upload is worth setting up once and forgetting. Beyond that, I'd skip any CMS feature that renders important content entirely in JavaScript without a server-side fallback. If the crawler can't read it, it doesn't exist for ranking purposes.