Why do we use alt text on images?

[thompsonmichael]

Hello friends,

Why do we use alt text on images?

[Williams Reus]

For any image on your site, the alt tag should describe what’s on it. Screen readers for the blind and visually impaired will read out this text and thus make your image accessible.

[fayeseom]

Alt text means that alternative information - alternative information for users is not displayed or hidden images selected in the browser or the user agents simply can not afford to display. Image alt tag description to provide information to users.

[nancy07]

Alt text strengthens the message towards search engine spiders and improves the accessibility of your website.Each image should have an alt text. Not just for SEO purposes but also because blind and visually impaired people otherwise won’t know what the image is for.

[daviddakarai]

It helps to improve the keyword rankings and traffic for the website.

[sadianisar]

alt text is important to utilize for images as crawler cannot read the image that what is the image about. ALT TAG is an important tag for SEO.

[bangalorewebgur]

The required alt attribute specifies an alternate text for an image, if the image cannot be displayed. The alt attribute provides alternative information for an image if a user for some reason cannot view it (because of slow connection, an error in the src attribute, or if the user uses a screen reader).

[pablohunt2812]

This is important and necessary to add alt text to the photos on your website for three main reasons:
1. If images fails to load – If for any reason an image does not render on a web page, the alt tag will display in place. This means visitors to that web page understand what image should be there even though they are unable to see it.
2. For Search Engines – Search engines, such as Google and Bing regularly crawl web pages. It is easy for them to understand text copy on a page, however, images are difficult to read. This is where alt text comes to play. Alt text is used to describe to search engines what the image is showing, allowing search engines to give users better results when performing an image search.
Alt text is a great place to include your main keyword to improve your image search ranking for that term. However, it is important to use appropriate text that actually describes your image. You should not include keywords if they are not relevant to the image being displayed, and if it doesn’t describe the image. If you do this, it could do more harm than good and negatively affect your website’s SEO.
3. For the visually impaired – The visually impaired tend to use screen readers in order to browse web pages. These screen readers will identify and interpret what is being displayed on their screen. Alt text is needed to explain and describe to people using screen readers what is on your page. For this reason, it is important to convey contextual information that will explain the image in more detail.
When writing alt text for your website images, bear in mind these points:
Keep the text concise but be descriptive.
Write alt text for humans, not search engines. Provide people with contextual descriptions so they understand what the image is showing.
Don’t include keywords if they do not describe the image. (Doing this could have a negative impact on your SEO.)

[Astrosameer]

It is helpful in On page SEO and keyword ranking.

[BrandonCohan]

Alt text is used to identify the image says about what. This is used to optimize our sites ON Page errors.

[dennis123]

ALT tags provide a text alternative to an image. Alt tags help blind people understand what content you are displaying on your website. For the majority of people though, alt tags are simply used for search engines. When search engines crawl your website they use the alt tags to better understand the content of your website so that they can properly index it within the ranks of their search results.

[alpa]

The alt tag is used by screen readers, the browsers used by blind and visually impaired people.

[Rammadhur]

An alt tag is an attribute of an image element in HTML ,is used to describe a description about an image to tell the search engine what actually text containing by images for purpose of indexing.