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How to write great image Alt Text
Writing spot-on image descriptions improves the accessibility of your writing and your SEO.
My first so-called gig publishing content online was back when Yahoo’s GeoCities was still alive and kicking. I built and maintained a Tenchi Muyo! fan site, first using the built-in page builder and later started playing with custom HTML code.
That’s when I ran into the image alt text code.
At the time, I had no clear idea of what it was. So I usually left it blank, or attempted to describe the image in some haphazard way.
Fast forward to today: I now know how important image alternative text is for web accessibility. I love this quote by Tim Berners-Lee, director of W3C, because it sums up the main goal of the internet and how accessibility plays into that goal: “The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”
In particular, alt text improves web accessibility for those with certain disabilities, like color blindness, low or impaired vision, blindness, deafness, and other sensory disabilities.
And alt text can signal to Google and other search engines what your content is about, improving your page and image SEO “score.”
Image alt text do’s and don’ts
So now that you know why image alt text is important, how do you write good alt text that benefits your SEO, accurately describes your images, and is easily read by screen readers?
Let’s start with some general rules:
1. Write your alt text in sentence case. Ever wondered if you should use sentence case, title case, or all lowercase for your alt text? I sure did, and I’ve seen alt text written in each of these formats. But your alt text should be in sentence case, except for acronyms.
2. Capitalize those acronyms — but remove ampersands. How does that work, you ask? Take the acronym (and brand name) “AT&T” as an example. In alt text, “AT&T” is written “AT and T.”
3. Use keywords, but don’t keyword stuff your alt text. The idea is to improve accessibility and user experience for everyone, not have their…
