Can I use the same alt text for all images on same page?

Question

I have a blog post. Can I use the same alt tag for all images on same page?

Would this be a good practice of image SEO?

Answer 1

Using the same alt attributes for all images is not a good practice, you need to be careful of, is over optimising with ALT tags. This can lead to issues, alt attribute should be used to describe the image. So if you have an image of scissors you should use the alt tag that best describes it, which might be alt="Hair cutting scissors.".

Answer 2

Can I use the same alt tag for all images on same page?

Yes, but only if:

• All images on the page are identical and functional:
  alt="Pine tree company logo, introduces a new major section on the page"
• All images on the page are cosmetic and can be ignored without loss of information:
  alt=""

The general rule for alt attributes is that they should be what you would say on the phone if you were reading the web page to someone (because for many people, that is exactly how they are used).

Answer 3

Think of the alt tag for images as the meta title/description for when people are doing an image search. Depending on the image people do use image search to find websites.

If the images are only of a design nature, like a blue circle, red curvy line, shadow effect, et la ...

<img src="blue-line.png" alt="blue line">
<img src="shadow.png" alt="shadow">
<img src="transparent-pixel.png" alt="Transparent Pixel">

ARIA would rather no alt text be used, (although web academia maintains all images must have an alt tag -- They are wrong to not consider use case). In these cases, an empty alt="" is best practice, per BOIA (Bureau of Internet Accessibility).

<img src="blue-line.png" alt="">
<img src="shadow.png" alt="">
<img src="transparent-pixel" alt="">

All I can say is the Government pays well for "accessible to all" content.

The difference is meaningless as alt="" is null and the same as no alt. unless there are legal reasons to show the site is, "accessible to all," then it means everything, (in court).

https://www.boia.org/blog/images-that-dont-need-alternative-text-still-need-alt-attributes

At ARIA intelligent people exist

Take for example a rating system with 5 stars, do you alt="star" each one? No, but the wrapper that holds the images is playing the role of one image providing the rating.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Roles/img_role

<span role="img" aria-label="Rating: 4 out of 5 stars">
  <span>★</span>
  <span>★</span>
  <span>★</span>
  <span>★</span>
  <span>☆</span>
</span> 

Take away is to look at the image in context to see what it should say for those who need or want the description of what is being looked at. And, remove all alt="yellow star" from images on the page, which is not useful for anyone.

Answer 4

Using same alt tag for all images in same page is a useless idea. It just waist your time. Only use alt tag when you want to keep a record in search engines crawling result or for screen readers etc. alt = alternative , like an image can talk visually for your user aka human, alt can talk with search engines for seo.

Answer 5

I did this and everything was fine, provided that in general, the key density on the page did not exceed the spam value. That is, the most important thing is that using the same key - do not overspam.