Alternative text is one of the simplest optimisations available and one of the most frequently neglected. It is a short written description of an image that screen readers announce to visually impaired users and that search engines use to understand what a picture shows. Because images cannot be read the way text can, alt text is effectively the image's caption for machines and assistive technology. Adding it well improves accessibility compliance, strengthens topical relevance, creates opportunities to appear in image search, and provides a useful fallback whenever an image fails to load.

Why Alt Text Deserves More Attention Than It Gets

On a typical site audit we find that between forty and seventy percent of content images have missing or useless alternative text. Values like DSC_0492, banner-final-v3 or a comma separated list of keywords are extremely common. Each of those represents a small accessibility failure and a missed relevance signal. Multiplied across hundreds of pages, fixing them becomes a meaningful improvement that requires no new content and no development work beyond editing.

How AAMAX.CO Can Help With Image Optimisation

At AAMAX.CO we audit entire image inventories, identify every file with missing or poor alternative text, and rewrite descriptions that are accurate, natural and aligned with each page's topic. We pair that with technical image work such as modern format conversion, responsive sizing, compression, descriptive file naming and image sitemaps so your visuals load quickly and become genuinely discoverable. If you want image optimisation handled properly across your whole website, hire AAMAX.CO for comprehensive SEO services. We are a full service digital marketing company providing web development, digital marketing and SEO worldwide, which means we can fix the templates producing bad markup as well as the content itself.

What Alt Text Actually Is

In HTML, alternative text lives in the alt attribute of an image element. A correctly marked up image looks like this in principle: an image tag with a source, a width and height, and an alt attribute containing a concise description such as a woman reviewing analytics dashboards on a laptop. Screen readers read that description aloud. Browsers display it when the image cannot render. Search engines treat it as one of the strongest available clues about the image's subject, alongside the file name, surrounding text and caption.

How to Add Alt Text in WordPress

Open the media library or click an image inside the block editor. In WordPress the image block shows an Alternative Text field in the settings sidebar, and the media library shows the same field when you select a file. Type a plain description of what the image shows and save. Important detail: editing alt text in the media library updates the default used for future insertions but does not always change images already placed in older posts, so update those individually. For bulk work, a media library plugin or a direct database update can process hundreds of files at once, but always review a sample manually afterwards.

How to Add Alt Text in Other Platforms

Most modern platforms expose the same field under a slightly different label. Shopify offers image alt text when editing product media. Wix and Squarespace provide it in the image settings panel. Webflow includes an alt text field in the image element settings and supports pulling descriptions from a collection field for dynamic content. Page builders such as Elementor and Divi inherit the WordPress media library value but also allow per instance overrides. In headless setups, store the description as a field on the image record in your content management system and render it into the alt attribute in your template so editors never have to touch code.

How to Write Alt Text That Works

Describe the image as you would to someone on the phone who cannot see it, focusing on what matters in the context of the page. Aim for roughly five to fifteen words. Be specific: an orange tabby cat sleeping on a windowsill is far better than cat. Do not begin with image of or picture of, because screen readers already announce that it is an image. Include a target keyword only when it genuinely describes what is shown. Never chain keywords together, because that harms accessibility, reads as manipulation and can be treated as spam.

Decorative Images and When to Leave Alt Empty

Not every image needs a description. Purely decorative elements such as background flourishes, spacer graphics and icons that sit beside text already conveying the same meaning should have an empty alt attribute. An empty attribute tells screen readers to skip the image entirely, which produces a cleaner listening experience. Omitting the attribute altogether is different and worse, because some screen readers then read the file name aloud. The rule is simple: if removing the image would lose information, describe it; if not, use an empty value.

Special Cases: Charts, Screenshots, Logos and Linked Images

Data visualisations deserve extra care. Summarise the insight rather than listing every data point, for example a bar chart showing organic traffic growing steadily across four quarters, and provide the underlying figures in nearby text or a table. For screenshots in tutorials, describe the specific interface element the reader must find. Logos should generally use the organisation name. When an image is wrapped in a link and there is no accompanying text, the alt text must describe the link destination rather than the picture, because it becomes the accessible name of that link.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The frequent errors we correct include copying the same description onto every image on a page, using the page title as generic alt text everywhere, leaving automatically generated camera file names in place, writing paragraph length descriptions that are exhausting to hear read aloud, and relying on the title attribute instead of alt. The title attribute is not a substitute; it is inconsistently supported and largely ignored by assistive technology. Also remember that text baked into an image is invisible to search engines and screen readers, so important messaging belongs in real HTML.

Auditing and Verifying Your Implementation

Crawl the site with an SEO tool and export a list of images with missing, empty or duplicate alt attributes. Prioritise pages that drive traffic or revenue and images that carry real information. Verify individual pages with browser developer tools or an accessibility extension, and test a few pages with an actual screen reader to hear how the descriptions sound in sequence. Combine this with checks on file size and dimensions, since a perfectly described three megabyte image still damages the experience.

Final Thoughts

Adding alt text is quick, cheap and permanent. Describe each meaningful image accurately in a short natural sentence, leave decorative images with an empty attribute, keep keywords honest, and make the description field part of your standard publishing checklist so the problem never returns. Do that consistently and you will improve accessibility for real users, give search engines clearer signals about your content, and unlock image search traffic that most competitors leave on the table.