2.9 – Image Alt Text Generation Lesson

Lesson Overview

Image alt text is a key part of any SEO-focused content strategy. It serves two important roles: making your website more accessible for users with visual impairments and helping search engines understand the content of your visuals. This lesson explains what alt text is, why it matters, and how to generate high-quality alt text using ChatGPT and SEO techniques.

In earlier lessons, you learned how to name your image files with clarity and keywords. Now, the focus shifts to writing alt text—those behind-the-scenes descriptions that screen readers and search engines rely on. You’ll see why poorly written or missing alt text can limit both accessibility and Google’s ability to index your visuals. With real-world examples, like product photos, service images, and infographics, this lesson shows how to write alt text that’s useful, accurate, and SEO-friendly.

If you are building a new website, updating a business page, or managing an online store, mastering alt text writing ensures your content is findable and accessible to everyone. This process fits right into a modern content workflow, pairing improved usability with better search visibility.

Who This Is For

If you need your images to help—not hurt—your website’s visibility and accessibility, this lesson will be useful.

• Website owners aiming to improve search rankings
• Content creators optimizing blogs or ecommerce images
• Marketers enhancing local business pages with better SEO
• Designers ensuring their visuals are accessible to all users
• Educators or course builders publishing instructional content

Where This Fits in a Workflow

Adding accurate, keyword-rich alt text is a step that comes after you’ve named your images correctly and before you publish them on your site. Alt text is crucial anytime you upload a new image—whether it’s for product listings, blog posts, or informational graphics. For example, if you’re updating a product gallery, you’ll rename your files, then use the techniques shown in this lesson to craft and enter descriptive alt text for each image. Similarly, for an infographic or local business photo, you’ll generate alt text that reflects its content and location, supporting both accessibility and local SEO. Good alt text is not an afterthought—it’s a regular, repeatable part of web publishing.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Manual image descriptions are often overlooked or too brief—think “image1.jpg” and missing or generic alt text. This approach misses key SEO and accessibility advantages. By using structured prompts with ChatGPT, you can quickly generate alt text that is both descriptive and keyword-aware, without falling into the trap of keyword stuffing or vague language.

When you apply these methods, you save time while improving the overall quality of your site:

• Your images become discoverable in image search, driving more organic traffic
• Visually impaired users receive meaningful descriptions that enhance their browsing experience
• Editors and site managers work more efficiently, ensuring consistency even across large collections of images
• Including location and specific details can help local businesses appear in relevant searches

This step boosts both user trust and search performance, making your site more competitive and easier to navigate.

Practice Exercise

Try applying what you’ve learned by working with a set of images from your own website or portfolio. Here’s a quick exercise:

1. Select three images (e.g., a product photo, a service in action, and an infographic).
2. Use ChatGPT and the provided prompts to generate alt text for each image, making sure to:
   - Include a relevant keyword naturally
   - Keep the text under 125 characters for accessibility
   - Adjust the prompt to include location or summarize key infographic points as needed
3. Enter the generated alt text into your website editor or CMS for each image.

Reflection: Compare your custom alt text to any automatically generated or default options. How are your new versions clearer, more descriptive, and more SEO-friendly?

Course Context Recap

This lesson builds directly on your new skills in naming images clearly and descriptively so that search engines and users get maximum value from your site’s visuals. Previously, you focused on image titles and file names; now, you expanded to writing accessible, search-friendly alt text. In the upcoming lesson, you’ll learn to evaluate and measure your content improvement efforts with analytics and best practices. Keep moving through the course to strengthen your entire SEO workflow for even better results.