SEO glossary
Alt text
Alt text is the written description in an image's alt attribute, read aloud by screen readers and shown when the image fails to load.
Its first job is accessibility, and treating it as an SEO field is what produces the bad version. Write what someone who cannot see the image would need to know in order to follow the page. If the sentence would sound strange read aloud, it is wrong.
An empty alt="" is a legitimate and often correct value. Decorative images — dividers, background textures, icons beside text that already says the same thing — should have it, because it tells a screen reader to skip them rather than announcing a filename.
The SEO benefit is real but secondary: alt text is how an image gets understood for image search, and it gives Google context about the page. Stuffing keywords into it damages the accessibility it exists for and has been a spam signal for a long time.
Common question
- How long should alt text be?
- As long as it takes to convey what matters, usually a short sentence. There is no limit that helps; there is a limit to how much anyone wants read aloud.
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