Understanding and Implementing Alt Text for Better SEO and Accessibility Learn the significance of alt text, how to use it effectively for SEO and accessibility, and why it’s essential for your website’s images. Discover best practices and avoid common mistakes to enhance your site’s image optimization and inclusivity.

In this guide, you will learn about alternative text (known as alt text): what it is, why it is crucial for on-page SEO, how to use it correctly, and more.

It’s often overlooked, but every image on your website should have alt text. More information is better, and translating visual information into text is important for search engine bots attempting to understand your website and users with screen readers.

Alt text is another source of information that ties ideas and content together on your website.

This practical guide contains tips and advice you can immediately use to improve your website’s image SEO and accessibility.

What Is Alt Text?

Alternative text (or alt text) – also known as the alt attribute or the alt tag (although it is not technically a tag) – is simply a piece of text that describes the image in HTML code.

What Are The Uses Of Alt Text?

The original function of alt text was simply to describe an image that could not be loaded. Many years ago, when the internet was much slower, alt text would help you know the content of an image that was too heavy to load in your browser. Today, images rarely fail to load – but if they do, it is the alt text you will see in place of an image.

Alt text also helps search engine bots understand the image’s content and context. More importantly, alt text is critical for accessibility and for people using screen readers:

• Alt text helps people with disabilities (for example, using screen readers) learn about the image’s content.

Of course, like every element of SEO, it is often misused or, in some cases, even abused.

Let’s take a closer look at why alt text is important.

Why Alt Text Is Important

The web and websites offer a very visual experience. It is hard to find a website without images or graphic elements. That’s why alt text is very important.

Alt text helps translate the image’s content into words, making the image accessible to a wider audience, including people with disabilities and search engine bots that cannot fully understand every image, its context, and its meaning.

Why Alt Text Is Important For SEO

Alt text is an important aspect of on-page SEO optimization. Proper alt text optimization increases your website’s chance of ranking in Google image searches. Yes, alt text is a ranking factor for Google image search. Depending on your website’s niche and specificity, Google image search traffic may play a huge role in your website’s overall success.

For instance, on e-commerce websites, users often start their search for products with a Google image search instead of typing the product name into the standard Google search.

Google and other search engines may display fewer product images (or not display them at all) if you fail to optimize their alt text.

Without proper image optimization, you may lose a lot of potential traffic and customers.

Why Alt Text Is Important For Accessibility

Visibility in Google image search is important, but accessibility is an even more significant consideration.

Fortunately, recent years have seen more focus on accessibility (making the web accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities and users who utilize screen readers).

Suppose the alt text of your images accurately describes their content instead of, for example, stuffing keywords. You are helping people who cannot see this image better understand it and the content of the entire webpage.

Let’s say one of your web pages is an SEO audit guide that contains screenshots from various crawling tools. Would it be better to describe the content of each screenshot instead of using the same alt text as “SEO audit” for every image?

Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Alt Text Examples

Finding many good and bad examples of alt text is not difficult. Let me show you a few, sticking to the above example with an SEO audit guide.

Good Alt Text Examples

Our example SEO guide contains screenshots from tools such as Google Search Console and Screaming Frog. Good examples of alt text may include:

<img src="google-search-console-coverage-report.jpg" alt="The coverage report in Google Search Console showing the number of indexed and excluded pages" />
<img src="google-search-console.jpg" alt="Google's Search Console tool" />
<img src="screaming-frog-html-pages.jpg" alt="List of HTML pages in Screaming Frog" />
<img src="screaming-frog.jpg" alt="Screaming Frog crawl in progress" />

Tip: It’s a good idea to ensure your file names are descriptive. While not a ranking factor, it’s recommended as a good SEO practice.

Bad And/Or Spammy Alt Text Examples

I’ve also seen many examples of bad alt text use, including keyword stuffing or spamming. Here’s how you can turn the above good examples into bad ones:

<img src="google-search-console-coverage-report.jpg" alt="SEO audit free SEO cheap specialist audits" />
<img src="google-search-console.jpg" alt="Google SEO Google Search Console" />
<img src="screaming-frog-html-pages.jpg" alt="SEO auditor SEO audit audits" />
<img src="screaming-frog.jpg" alt="SEO audit" />

As seen, these examples do not provide any information on what the images actually show.

Common Alt Text Mistakes

Stuffing keywords in the alt text is not the only mistake you can make. Here are a few more common alt text mistakes:

• Failure to use alt text or using empty alt text.
• Using the same alt text for different images.
• Using very general alt text that does not adequately describe the image. For instance, using the alt text "dog" on a photo of a dog instead of describing the dog’s features and actions.
• Automatically using the file name as alt text – which may result in unfriendly alt text, such as “googlesearchconsole” instead of a descriptive alternative.

Alt Text Writing Tips

Here are tips on how to write effective alt text that fulfills its purpose:

• Do not stuff keywords into the alt text. This will not help your web page rank for these keywords.
• Describe the image in detail but keep it short. Avoid adding multiple sentences to the alt text.
• Use your target keywords naturally as part of the image description. If the target keyword doesn’t fit, don’t use it.
• Avoid using text on images; instead, encode all text as HTML.
• Don’t write "This is an image of." Both Google and users know it is an image.
• Ensure you can visualize the image’s content by reading its alt text. That is the best exercise to ensure your alt text is adequate.

How To Troubleshoot Image Alt Text

You now know the best practices and common mistakes of alt text. But how do you check what’s in the alt text of a website’s images?

• Inspecting an element (right-click and select Inspect while hovering over an image) is a good way to check if an image has alt text.

For a bulk check, you may use one of the following methods:

• Install the Web Developer Chrome extension. Open the page whose images you want to audit. Click on Web Developer and navigate to Images > Display Alt Attributes. This displays the alt text of all images on a webpage.

• To audit the alt text for an entire website, use a crawler like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Crawl the site, navigate to the image report, and review the alt text for all images.

How To Find And Fix Missing Alt Text

To verify alt text for all images on your website, export images with missing alt text and address those issues.

Alt Text May Not Seem Like A Priority, But It’s Important

Every source of information about your content has value. For both vision-impaired users and bots, alt text helps contextualize the images on your website.

While alt text is only a ranking factor for image search, any step you take to help search engines understand your website can potentially help deliver more accurate results. Demonstrating a commitment to accessibility is also crucial in modern digital marketing.

FAQ

What is the purpose of alt text in HTML?

Alternative text, or alt text, serves two main purposes in HTML. Its primary function is to provide a textual description of an image if it cannot be displayed, helping users understand the image content when technical issues prevent it from loading or when they use a screen reader. Additionally, alt text aids search engine bots in understanding the image’s subject matter, which is crucial for SEO.

Can alt text improve website accessibility?

Yes, alt text is vital for website accessibility. It translates visual information into descriptive text that can be read by screen readers used by users with visual impairments. By accurately describing images, alt text ensures that all users can understand a web page’s content, making the web more inclusive.

More resources:

Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock