: How important is writing unique text for each image when bulk uploading images of a subject to my website for image SEO? Tom Cruise, for example, who is an American and Hollywood actor. I

@Angela700

First off all, I think that it's imperative that everyone understand what an "alt tag" (alt being short for "alternative") is in the first place. The accessibility portion of the Penn State site describes it well: "a clear text alternative of the image for screen reader users."

You may or may not know that individuals who are using a screen reader are living with a visual impairment, or otherwise handicapped. This issue prevents them from seeing the information on a web page. The alt tag's foremost purpose is to help handicapped understand what the image is about. Secondarily, alt tags can help search engine crawlers index an image correctly.

The previous answer provided by Kristian is certainly more efficient, however I caution you to not use any type of programmatic naming convention.

This is bigger than SEO people. I work closely with a company who built a website for Dallas Arboretum, and not long after they launched, they were up against some sort of discrimination lawsuit because one or more visually impaired users did not receive accurate information through the screen reader. They won the lawsuit.

When you write alt tags, be sure to do so with the user in mind. Do not focus purely on SEO nor search engines. Yes, it is an SEO ranking factor - but the factor has more to do with whether or not you wrote the alt tag correctly vs. whether you are stuffing keywords in the alt tag.

According to moz.com, an alt tag should be sufficiently descriptive, but should not contain any spammy attempts at keyword stuffing.

Here is the alt tag test: If you can close your eyes, and have someone read the alt tag to you, and imagine a reasonably accurate version of the image - then you have passed the test.

Further reading is available here: moz.com/learn/seo/alt-text.
No website omission is worthy of a lawsuit. Take the time to do it right!

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@Correia994

You should try to adopt a smart naming convention for your image file names since search engines will look at the file name when understanding what it contains.
If you can't make the filenames unique with keywords then at least make them unique using Tom's name and a number, maybe also a year, image size, another celebrity in the image or something that can help you distinguish between all images in your library. Like tom-cruise-nicole-kidman-1000x1000-01-2017.jpg

Next, search engines will look at the text content on the page where the image is published. The text close to an image will be associated with the image aswell and help you rank in the search results.

Then we have the image ALT-text. You really should make sure the images have good ALT text. I understand that it can be very time consuming to write unique ALT-text. But you should try. If that is not possible I would recommend that you try to programmatically add the page title or headline to the ALT-text. That way, if you have seo optimized titles/headlines you will automatically have that for your images too.

Regarding harmful for seo. You can name the filenames whatever you like. You will not get penalized for that. But if you give all images same ALT text you might get a penalty for over optimization which will lower your ranking position and maybe even some duplicate content.

Don't forget to resize your images and compress them. You can do that in bulk from Photoshop or plugins.

Good luck @Champion

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