What’s Your Image Alt Text Usage Strategy?

Images are part of your content. You can use the images for two main reason:

1. To add important information (to explain something more vividly and to visualize what you have put in text).
2. To decorate your article (to make it more eye-catching and easier to remember).

Alt text implementation depends on the purpose of using the image:

Alt Text for Accessibility and Usability:

1. Include descriptive alternative text for content-sensitive/meaningful images (i.e. those that add important information to the text): alt text is what people who turned off displaying images will see and blind people will hear in place of the image.
2. If an image was used for purely decorative purposes, assign an alt text to null value (alt=””) so that the image could be completely ignored by screen readers.

Alt Text for SEO:

1. Add keyword-optimized alt text:
   • To enhance the page keyword prominence;
   • So that people referred by image search results were tempted to visit the page (If you were searching for link building, for example, which image would be more interesting for you: a graph detailing the link building process or a chain symbolizing the process which is how posts on link building are decorated?).
2. Skip the alt text at all (in this cases I usually use title instead). You will need to use empty alt text (alt=””) though for validation purposes though.