Hi, SEers. Welcome to the first Mae Day of April. Thanks for visiting with me today.

Let’s chat alt text.

I’ve blogged about this on Story Empire in the past, but I think it bears repeating. Several times, vision-impaired visitors to my personal blog have thanked me for using descriptive text in conjunction with my images. Why? Because it allows them to “see” the images I’ve placed. Screen readers make this possible.

Everyone should benefit from the same reading experience, which is why I’m a strong advocate of alt text.

In addition to aiding vision impaired users, alt text also displays when a browser fails to load an image, and helps search engines to better categorize the images they discover.  If you use stock photography, many sites already deliver alt text descriptions with your purchase. I use BigStockPhoto.com, which loads descriptive text in the caption field. I cut this…