“Alt text” is an attribute of the image tag. It contains “alternative text” that is displayed whenever your browser can’t display an image. In the early days of the Internet, alt text was used as a placeholder until all of a web page’s images were successfully downloaded. Nowadays, alt text is particularly useful to these people:
- People with disabilities who use assistive technology, such as braille displays or screen readers
- People using text-only browsers, such as mobile phone web surfers or people with low bandwidth connections, who may have graphics turned off
- Online business owners!
Good, concise, descriptive alt text is not only good for your visitors — it’s good for search engine spiders, too. Spiders take image alt text into consideration when they determine page rankings. This can make it tempting to start keyword stuffing all of your image alt text — don’t do it!
Search engines will penalize black hat behavior when they encounter it, and not only that, it’s downright rude to your visitors who are using screen readers and who will have to sit through the whole keyword list as it is read aloud. Here is an example of an image tag with alt text:
<img src=”image.jpg” alt=”Image of my FREE eBook”>
