alt text
Alt text is a short written description attached to an image so that screen readers can describe it to someone who cannot see it, and so search engines know what the picture actually shows.
Alt text, short for alternative text, is a written description attached to an image, invisible in normal browsing but read aloud by screen readers and read directly by search engines, which cannot see a picture the way a person does. It answers the same question either way: what is actually in this image, in plain words.
Someone using a screen reader because of a visual impairment hears “woman signing paperwork at a desk with a client” instead of silence or, worse, the filename the image happened to be saved under. A search engine reads the same description to understand what a page’s images contribute to the topic.
Why it matters to you
This is one of the rare pieces of technical detail that is simultaneously an accessibility requirement, a legal exposure issue in some jurisdictions, and a small, genuine SEO benefit, all from the same handful of words per image. Skipping it costs you all three at once for no real savings in effort.
For a business whose site includes any meaningful visual content, a gallery, before-and-after photos, a team page, missing or lazy alt text means a whole category of visitors experiences a broken, confusing site, even though nothing looks wrong to anyone who can see it.
How I set it up
I write real, specific descriptions for every image that conveys information: what it shows, and enough context to matter, not a generic label like “photo” or the filename left untouched. Purely decorative images, spacing graphics, background textures, get marked so a screen reader knows to skip them rather than announcing something meaningless.
This gets checked as part of the same accessibility review I run on every site, rather than treated as a separate SEO chore, because it genuinely is both at once. It is also one of the easier things to get right from the start and one of the easiest to let slip on a site edited casually over time, so I build it into the process rather than leaving it to memory.
What it looks like in practice
Turn on a screen reader and browse the site, and every meaningful image announces something specific and accurate, not silence and not a jumble of numbers and letters from a filename. Search an image-heavy term related to your business, and your images have a real, if modest, chance of showing up in image search results because they are described accurately.
None of this is visible to a typical sighted visitor scrolling the page. That is exactly the point. It is infrastructure that quietly serves the people who need it and costs nothing to everyone else.
Questions I get about this
- Does every image need alt text?
- Every image that conveys information does. A purely decorative image, a background pattern with nothing to describe, can be marked as decorative instead so a screen reader skips it, which is also a deliberate, correct choice rather than an oversight.
- Can I just stuff it with keywords instead of describing the image?
- You can, and it is a bad idea. A screen reader reads it aloud exactly as written, so a string of keywords instead of a real description is a genuinely worse experience for someone relying on it, and search engines are good at recognising the pattern anyway.
- Does good alt text actually help SEO, or is that a myth?
- It helps, modestly, mainly through image search and by giving search engines one more accurate signal about what a page contains. It is not a major ranking lever on its own, but it is a real one, and it costs nothing extra to do properly the first time.
Want this set up properly for your business?
This is the kind of thing I build every week. Grab a time and we will talk through what fits.