Alt Text
Alt text is a piece of text or a word inserted as an attribute in HTML. The role of alt text is to describe an image in order to help crawlers and screen-reading tools describe the image to search engine crawlers or visually impaired readers.
What is Alt Text?
Alt text (alternative text), also known as "alt tag", "alt attribute" or "alt description," is a piece of text or a word inserted as an attribute into an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) document to describe the appearance or functionality of an image. This helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to crawl your website better. Within most website editors or content management systems (CMSs), the alt-text can be added by simply clicking on the image that was inserted in the blog post or site. There is a field to add the image alt-text, and it is automatically written into the webpage's HTML source code as well, so you can edit the alt-text at any time.
Why is Alt Text important?
Adding alt text to your website's images helps:
- Make the website accessible for visually impaired visitors. The alternative text will be read by the screen readers easily, and your content can be consumed and understood by everyone.
- Search engine crawlers index your website and its images properly.
- Place the relevant keywords for your website in order to improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). As long as the alt text is very descriptive and the keywords make sense for your image and web page content, it works exactly like any other content across the site. However, please avoid keyword stuffing, and do not add a set of keywords in a row just for SEO purposes - the practice is both ineffective and unethical.
