If you’re here I’m sure you are doing some form of SEO or website optimisation looking to check image alt tags are set correctly. Ensuring if Alt Tags are set on all images is important so as Google crawls your site it has a text based description of what the image is. As smart as Google is, it can’t determine exactly what an image is without some help. Using the Alt tag helps in many ways but the two biggest ways are:

• a higher ranking from Google as your websites HTML is structured better; and
• it increases search traffic through Google Image Search as people can now find your images much easier

So how do we check Alt tags set?

Well first we need to understand the two ways images can be used.

1. The most common way is directly adding a HTML image tag on a page using the <img> tag. When it is added this way you can see the Alt tag by inspecting the element and viewing the HTML. It should look something like this.

<img src=’http://theagencyjournal.com/image.jpg” alt=”Black Dodge Charger 2016“/>

The alt tag is between the quotes in bold and without even seeing the image I’m sure you can tell what the image is.

2. The other way you can load an image on a page is through CSS. CSS is basically a code file which styles the website. It can load in images in a webpage as background image on HTML elements. See below for a screen shot of how to see these using the Inspect Elementfunction on Chrome.

These don’t use Alt tags but instead use Title tags on the containing HTML element (which I haven’t done myself in this case – naughty). This generally looks like below:

<div class=”dodge” title=”Black Dodge Charger 2016″> lots of content </div>

Again without seeing the image you can tell what is by reading the bolded text which is what Google does.

Want to check the Alt Tags on your page but aren’t tech savvy? Try our Alt Tag Checker which allows you to enter a URL and it will show you which images do not have Alt tags set on them.