Website Glossary · Letter A
What Is Alt Text?
Alt text is a short written description attached to an image in a website's code. It tells screen readers what the image shows, appears if the image fails to load, and gives search engines the only readable account of what is in the picture.
What Alt Text Is and Where It Lives
Here is something most business owners never think about. A photo on your website is, to a machine, a rectangle of colored dots. That is all. Your gorgeous shot of a finished kitchen, the one you are proud of, is a wall of pixels with no meaning attached.
Alt text is the sentence you attach to that rectangle telling anything that cannot see it what is actually there. It sits in the code, invisible to most visitors, and it is the only description that exists. Without it the photo is a blank to every screen reader and every search engine that ever looks at your site.
It does three jobs at once, which is unusual for something this small. A blind visitor hears it read aloud. A search engine reads it to understand what your photo shows. And when an image fails to load, which happens on slow connections and broken links, the alt text appears in its place so the visitor at least knows what was supposed to be there.
Alt is short for alternative. It is the alternative to the image, the version that exists when the picture cannot be seen. That framing is the whole trick to writing it well. You are not labeling the photo. You are replacing it for somebody who will never see it.
Why It Matters for a Local Business
Start with the person. Somebody who is blind lands on your site to find a plumber. They hear your headline, your services, your phone number. Then they reach your photo gallery, the proof that you do good work, and they hear this: IMG underscore 4471 dot jpg. IMG underscore 4472 dot jpg. IMG underscore 4473 dot jpg.
That is what your gallery sounds like. Not a description of your beautiful work. A list of file names, read out one at a time, meaning nothing. The proof you were counting on simply is not there for them. And they do not email you about it. They hire the next plumber.
Then there is the search side. Your photos are a real asset. They show real work, in real houses, in real towns. Alt text is the only way any of that becomes findable. Without it, twenty pictures of completed jobs contribute exactly nothing to how your site is understood.
And missing alt text is the single most commonly flagged item in website accessibility complaints, which puts it right at the center of the ADA compliance conversation whether an owner wants to be in that conversation or not.
What Bad Alt Text Looks Like
There are three ways to get this wrong, and one of them is not obvious at all.
That third one deserves attention because it passes every automated check. A scanning tool sees text in the field and reports no problem. A blind visitor hears the word "image" nineteen times and learns nothing. The box is full and the job is undone.
The keyword stuffing version is worth a warning too. It was a real tactic once, back when you could shove terms anywhere and get credit. Now it is a recognizable pattern, and the same instinct that produced stuffed footers and cloned city pages is the instinct that leads to an algorithmic penalty. Describing your photo honestly is both the right thing and the effective thing, which is not always how this works but is how it works here.
How to Write It Well
Use the phone test. Somebody calls and asks what is in the photo on your website. What do you say? You say "it's a kitchen we finished last month, white cabinets, big quartz island." You do not say "kitchen remodel kitchen contractor kitchen renovation." You do not say "image." You describe the thing.
Write that sentence down. That is your alt text. It really is that simple, and the simplicity is why so few sites get it right, because it feels like it should require a technique.
The Rules That Cover Almost Everything
- One sentence, under about 125 characters. Screen readers can cut off longer text, and nobody wants a paragraph read at them.
- Skip "image of" and "photo of." The screen reader already announced it is an image. Saying it again wastes the first three words.
- Decorative images get an empty description. Dividers, swirls, background shapes. Empty is a real instruction, and it means skip this.
- If the image is a link, describe where it goes. A logo that goes home should say what happens, not what the logo looks like.
- If there is text in the image, the alt text says the text. A graphic with your hours on it needs those hours written out.
- Name the town when it is honest to. A bathroom in Riverhead is a bathroom in Riverhead. That is a description, not a keyword.
That fifth rule comes with a bigger warning attached. If your hours or your phone number live inside a graphic, alt text is a patch on a hole you should not have dug. Nobody can tap a phone number in a picture. Put real information in real text and let the images be images.
Here is what makes all of this land. The description you write for a blind visitor is the same description a search engine reads, and the same description an AI assistant reads when it is trying to figure out what your business does. One honest sentence serves all three, which is why doing this right feeds directly into algorithmic trust. A site that describes itself plainly is a site that can be confirmed.
How Cannone Marketing Handles This for Every Client
Every image on every site gets real alt text written by hand. Not the file name, not a pile of keywords, not the word "image" typed in to make a checker happy. An actual sentence describing what is in the picture, the way you would describe it to somebody on the phone. Decorative elements get marked as decorative so screen readers skip past them instead of reading noise.
Your hours, your phone number, and your service list never get locked inside a graphic in the first place, so no alt text is patching a hole that should not exist. When you send over new photos of finished work, the descriptions get written for you as part of adding them, under Worry-Free Support at no extra charge.
The cost is $199 one time to set it up and $49 per month after that. No contracts. You work directly with Mike Cannone on every request, with no middlemen and no account managers.
Related Terms
Common Questions About Alt Text
How long should alt text be for a business website photo?
One clear sentence is usually right, and under about 125 characters is a good target. Screen readers can cut off longer descriptions, and a paragraph is tiring to listen to. The test is simple. Describe the photo the way you would describe it to someone on the phone, then stop.
Does every single image on a website need alt text?
Every image needs the attribute, but not every image needs a description. Photos of work, products, staff, and anything meaningful need real descriptions. Purely decorative images like dividers, background shapes, and swirls get an empty description on purpose, which tells a screen reader to skip them instead of reading out something useless.
Should a business put keywords in their alt text to help ranking?
Only when they belong there naturally. Describing a photo as a completed kitchen remodel in Riverhead is accurate and happens to contain useful words. Stuffing a description with every service and town a business offers is keyword stuffing, and it is one of the older tricks search engines learned to spot. Describe the picture honestly and the useful words appear on their own.
What happens if a business website has no alt text at all?
Blind visitors hear file names read out loud instead of descriptions, which makes the page close to useless for them. Search engines have no idea what any of the photos show. Missing alt text is also the single most commonly flagged item in website accessibility complaints, which is why it comes up in that conversation constantly.
Is alt text the same thing as the caption under a photo?
No. A caption is visible text that everyone reads, sitting below the image on the page. Alt text lives in the code and is normally invisible, existing for screen readers, search engines, and moments when the image fails to load. A photo can have both, and they usually say different things.
Every Photo Described, Every Time
Real sentences on every image, written by hand, so a blind visitor knows what your work looks like and Google knows what your photos show. No file names, no keyword piles, no empty boxes. Request a free custom homepage demo and see your site built for you within 24 hours.
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