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Glossary · SEO

Alt text

The text alternative for an image — read by screen readers, used by search engines to understand image content, and shown when an image fails to load.

Definition

In long form.

Alt text is one of the few HTML attributes that does triple duty: accessibility (screen readers announce it), SEO (Google Image Search and image-context ranking signals), and graceful degradation (shown when the image fails to load). Decorative images should have empty alt (alt=""), not be missing alt entirely. Functional images (buttons, links) should describe the action, not the visual. Don't keyword-stuff — Google penalizes obvious alt-text spam.

In context

Most CMS-driven sites have alt text discipline failures: bulk uploads default to filename, and authors don't override. We add a pre-publish reminder in the CMS and audit alt text in our pre-launch checklist.

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