Alt text, titles and descriptions: the boring layer that works

Every video has a handful of text fields attached to it, and on most stores every one of them is either empty or filled with the filename. It is the cheapest unexploited SEO work available.

The video title

What the video is, in the words a person would use.

Bad: IMG_4471, Final_v3_APPROVED, Summer Campaign Asset 12.

Bad in a different way: “Linen shirt video best linen shirt buy linen shirt online”. Keyword stuffing is recognised instantly and it makes the title useless for the humans who see it.

Good: “Linen shirt in sand — how it fits and moves”. Specific, readable, and it contains the terms naturally because it is describing the thing.

The description

Two or three sentences. What is shown, which product, what question it answers.

This is frequently what appears under a result, so write it for somebody deciding whether to click. And do not paste the social caption — it was written for a feed, it assumes sound, and it usually ends with a request to follow you.

Alt text

A text equivalent for anyone who cannot see or play the video. Describe the content, not the medium.

Bad: “video”, “product video”, “shirt.mp4”.

Good: “A sand-coloured linen shirt worn open over a t-shirt, showing the drape at the shoulder and cuff.”

That sentence serves a screen reader, a search engine and a shopper whose connection failed. Three audiences, one field.

Thumbnail alt text

Separate from the video's own description and usually forgotten. The thumbnail is an image and it needs a description like any other image on the page.

Why it works

None of this is clever. It works because so few stores do it that the ones that do stand out to every system that reads pages — search engines, assistants, screen readers, and the preview cards that appear when someone shares a link.

The field nobody remembers: the share preview

When somebody pastes your product page into a message or a social post, the preview card that appears is built from the page’s own title, description and image — not from the video’s fields. It is a separate layer, and it is usually left to whatever the theme generated.

Worth checking on your ten most-shared pages, because the preview is the entire advertisement for a link somebody has already vouched for. A blank or generic card wastes a recommendation you did not have to earn.

A worked pass on one video

• Title: Linen shirt in sand — how it fits and moves
• Description: The sand linen shirt worn open over a t-shirt, showing the drape at the shoulder and how the cuff sits. Filmed on a 5‹11″ model wearing a medium.
• Alt text: A sand-coloured linen shirt worn open over a white t-shirt, moving as the wearer turns.
• Thumbnail alt text: Close view of the sand linen shirt’s collar and shoulder seam.

Four fields, ninety seconds. Every one of them is read by something — a search engine, an assistant, a screen reader, or a shopper whose connection dropped the video.

How to actually get it done

Do not try to fix two hundred videos. Take the ten that get the most plays, write the three fields properly for each, and then make it part of uploading anything new. Ten minutes now, thirty seconds per video after.