Alt text (alternative text) refers to the written description of images. It is also known as “alt description” or “alt attribute”. The purpose of alt text is to provide a description of the non-content elements on the pages (such as images) to people who can’t see them, maybe because of visual impairment or if they have turned off images in their web browsers.
Alt text is also used by search engines, such as Google, better understand the content of the image.
Alt text is important because of various reasons:
1. Improved Web Accessibility:
There are tons of people who suffer from visual impairment and use screen readers to surf the web. Alt text help such users understand the content in images.
2. Improves SEO
Even though alt text is not visible to all users, it can be read by search engines. In fact, search engines use the alt text to understand the image and show those images for relevant queries in Google Image searches.
1. Not every image needs an alt text:
You should audit your website to find images with missing alt text but don’t worry about putting an alt text for every image. There are certain images on websites that are just used for decorative purposes so you can avoid putting alt text for such images.
Download the SEO Audit Tool or use the Free Alt text Checker Tool above to find images with missing alt texts on your site.
2. Don’t do keyword stuffing:
Your alt text should only have relevant keywords. The alt text should be valuable and relevant to the page’s content. Only put keywords when it makes sense to do so.
3. Keep it short:
The length of an alt text for an image should be long enough to accurately describe the content of the image but also short enough to be concise and easily understood. The length of the alt text will obviously depend on the complexity of the image and the context in which it is used but still try to keep it below 100 words (approx. 1-2 sentences).
❗️ Please note that at times, the alt text checker may display an error message indicating that ‘0 images were found’, even if there are images present on the page. This issue may arise due to several factors such as images being hosted on a different domain or being loaded dynamically. In such cases, using paid tools like Ahrefs can help resolve these issues effectively.
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