Alt Text: What is it & Why it's Important for Web Accessibility & SEO
Writing good image alt text to improve the accessibility of your website along with SEO best practices!
What is Alt Text?
Alt Text (aka, alternative text) describes an image on a specific web page. The purpose of Alt Text is to help visually impaired people understand what the image is showing, search engines understand image content and will appear on the page if the image fails to load.
Alt Text is vital for search engines to enable them to better understand a page and provide people with the best possible results when searching online. This is because search engines such as Google and Bing, crawl web pages and are unable to understand image files through alt tags.
Why is Alt Text Important?
The primary goal is to ensure that visitors of different abilities are being well served when visiting your website. Alt Tags enable screen readers to read information about on-page images to benefit individuals with visual impairments or different learning abilities. People with visual impairments, low vision or learning disabilities should always be considered part of your target audience. Like anyone using the internet, they to use the web for vital needs such as banking, medical help, shopping, directions, etc.
Alt Text's Impact on SEO?
Alt Text is important when browsers are unable to render a page properly, meaning the web page will not load the page images. In place of these page images will be the Alt Tags instead. Describing what the image should be showing. If you do not have these Alt Tags set then the visitor will have no idea what image was meant to display.
Alt Text is very useful when it comes to search engine crawlers and improves your website's SEO. Failing to do so ultimately reduces the user experience for anyone visually impaired.
Alt Text's Best Practices
- Write text that accurately describes the image
- Keep it short, but avoid single-word values
- Use your primary keyword or a close variation
- No need to include the words ‘image’ or ‘picture’
- Provide an alt text for all images
- Use an image caption to show the alt-text value to users








