Alt Text Best Practices

[JanelleGrkovic]

I am working on alt texts for my WordPress website. I've done a bit of research and read best practices, but I am a bit confused on how to write some of the alt texts because my entire site includes images. I know this is a big no-no and I am working with my team to get the site SEO-optimized (better text to image ratio). However, in the meantime, I need to make sure that I have some alt texts for my images. Can someone help with the following questions:

1.) I have the same "close" button in 4 locations. Can I use "close" as the alt text four times? Or should I explain where the close button is or what it closes?

2.) If my image is only text and it is more than 125 characters, is this a problem? Should I use longdesc=? If so, how do I input that in a WP site?

3.) If I have my logo in 3 locations, should I differentiate the alt text?

4.) If I have FB icon, do I just state Facebook and don't say icon?

5.) I have some background images and they don't really provide relevancy to my site other than aesthetics so should I not have alt attribute? If so, do I just place alt="" in the alt text field or does it have to be in the code?

6.) In WordPress, do I remove the description under “title,” and just put a description under “alt-text?”

7.) Can I repeat alt texts? For example, I have 4 buy now buttons, should the alt text be “buy now” all 4 times or be specific to what they are buying, such as “Buy now – Teatopia Dream On supplement drink?”

8.) I have 4 nutrition label images so can I just state what each label refers to or is it expected to have a long description with all the text on the label?

9.) I have images for desktop vs. mobile. Can I have similar copy for both. The mobile page is not set-up to index so do I even need alt text for the mobile images?

10.) Can I have characters, such as dashes and commas, in the alt text? Does initial cap matter?

11.) For decorative images or when an alt-text is not needed, do I just place alt=”” in the alt text field in WordPress?

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

It is certainly quite possible that I'm doing wrong as well but basically if you manage to include the page title in the alt text you've essentially met your quality points for the most part. Because at one point I implemented those annoying popup overlays on an adult affiliate site, I coded some jQuery to randomly select 1 of 20 different banners.

not only did I want it to dynamically pic a random image, I needed for the image to have alt text entered on it as well. I was able to essentially use a snippet of code and the alt tags reverted to the page title automatically. It seemed to not only please Yoast, but Google as well.

I do fully understand that the initial intent of the alt tag is to take place of the image when it is not able to load, but for some reason matching the page title seems to be the all important Google pleaser. And as far as adding the same alt tag on every image on the page, my site didn't seem to effected negatively, but quite the contrary

Thing is, while Wordpress seems to pretty much only seem to impliment alt tags off the rip despite having a caption and description box, they don't seem to get implimented when u drop the image down. There's actually quite a few different  Image SEO metrics that are quite often overlooked. Rand has a white board Friday that covers pretty much all of them. I made this infographic based upon it.

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