How should a ALT TAG Be?

[Nettv]

Hi All,

Can a ALT Tag have special characters?

Can i have my ALT Tag as

Image-explained-with-what-it-is?

Can i have - hyphens as this?

Thanks

I have a 2nd question

I have 100's of videos which has a ALT tag as

How can i deal with them?

Can i add the Video title as ALT Tag?

thanks

[justin-brock]

That's not ideal.

If you're trying to do this programmatically in a CMS, perhaps there's a way to do something like:

alt="Photo {Some Property}"

alt="{Some Property}"

alt="Photo"

Using "Null" is worse than leaving it blank, I think.

[Nettv]

So these

Can be

Is this fine?

[Christy-Correll]

Just is correct that the primary purpose of alt text  to assist the visually impaired. Therefore, you should provide descriptive, concise alt text for every relevant image. So no, do not place hyphen between every word. You can (and should) use hyphens, accent marks, etc. for words that need them in alt text.

For non relevant, redundant images such as bullets and purely decorate images, you should use null alt text (alt=""). This will signal the screen reader to skip over the image.

Hope that helps! (Christy)

[justin-brock]

The primary purpose of the alt tag is to assist those visually impaired visitors who are using screen readers. Just make the tag descriptive of the image it is replacing - alt="Photo of Pole Vault Accident". For video thumbnails, you should do the same thing if you can. The video title will work fine.

I consider SEO a secondary consideration for alt tags. You may want to include targeted keywords there. But really, if you're focus is usability, and if the image is relevant to the content of the page, then you'll satisfy SEO when you focus on the alt tags' usability.

There are a lot of other more high-impact factors you can focus on - both on-page and off. If you've gotten on-page optimization down to alt tags, you may want to spend more time on link building.