Alt Text Is Not an SEO Trick

Alt text has been mangled by a decade of SEO advice. Keyword-stuffed, written for crawlers, applied indiscriminately to every image including the decorative divider lines.

Here's the actual rule: alt text is what someone hears instead of seeing the image. Write it for that person and the SEO takes care of itself.

The question to ask

Not "what is in this image?" but "what is this image doing here?"

The same photograph gets different alt text depending on its job:

• Illustrating a case study → "The Fulton Dental waiting room after the 2025 refit"
• Demonstrating a product feature → "The scheduling calendar showing three appointment types side by side"
• Purely decorative, next to text that already says it → alt=""

That last one matters. An empty alt attribute is a real, correct answer — it tells a screen reader to skip an image that adds nothing, rather than announcing "image, dot, hyphen, decoration" in the middle of a sentence.

What good alt text sounds like

Read the page aloud, substituting your alt text for each image. If the sentence still makes sense and nothing important vanished, you've written it correctly.

Some practical guidance:

• Be specific, be brief. A sentence, usually. If it needs a paragraph, the information belongs in the page text.
• Don't start with "image of." The screen reader already announced it's an image.
• Include text that appears in the image. If your infographic contains numbers, those numbers must be in the alt text or a caption — otherwise they simply don't exist for a portion of your audience.
• Describe function for anything clickable. For an image that is a link or a button, the alt text is what the control does: "Download the 2026 pricing sheet," not "PDF icon."
• Charts need their finding, not their appearance. "Bar chart" tells nobody anything. "Site speed improved from 4.2 to 1.6 seconds after optimization" is the actual content.

Where it overlaps with search

Search engines do read alt text, and it's how images get found in image search. But the version that ranks and the version that serves a blind visitor are the same version, because both want an accurate description of what's actually there.

Keyword stuffing fails both audiences and, these days, isn't even effective at the thing it was cheating at.

The part people forget

Alt text isn't only for screen readers. It's shown when an image fails to load — a slow connection, a broken path, a blocked CDN. On a bad mobile connection, alt text is what a sighted visitor gets too.

Getting an existing site fixed

Audit by traffic. Start with your most-visited pages, do the images that carry meaning, mark the decorative ones empty, and stop. You don't need to reach a hundred percent to be dramatically better than you were — and a site where the important images are described properly is worth far more than one where every image has a keyword glued to it.