Image Alt Text

Alt text serves three critical functions: it makes images accessible to visually impaired users using screen readers, it provides context to search engines that cannot see images, and it displays as fallback text when images fail to load. Google uses alt text as a primary signal for understanding image content and serving relevant image search results.

For content and engineering teams, write alt text that accurately describes the image content and context. Include relevant keywords naturally but avoid keyword stuffing. Decorative images should have empty alt attributes (alt="") to avoid cluttering screen reader output. For product images, include product name, key features, and color or variant information. For charts and graphs, summarize the key finding rather than describing every data point. Build alt text requirements into your content management workflow and audit existing pages for missing or unhelpful alt text. Image search drives significant traffic for many sites, and proper alt text is the foundation of image SEO. For programmatic pages with dynamic images, create alt text templates that incorporate entity-specific data.