Ever heard of the alt tag (sometimes also referred to as a "title tag")?  You may have noticed the option to use it when you insert an image into an LP blog or forum post.    Here's an example from my Blogger blog, a photo of a friend's mustang horse named "Ford".  ("Ford the Mustang", gettit?) Hover your cursor over the photo to see the description, often referred to as a "tooltip".



They're not necessary, but if you have your own website or blog, it's a good idea to use the attribute.  Why?

From Yola.com (and I've used the title tag in the following link):  What is alt text, and why do your photos need it?

1. If images fails to load – If for any reason an image does not render on a web page, the alt tag will display in place. This means visitors to that web page understand what image should be there even though they are unable to see it.

2. For Search Engines – Search engines, such as Google and Bing regularly crawl web pages. It is easy for them to understand text copy on a page, however, images are difficult to read. This is where alt text comes to play. Alt text is used to describe to search engines what the image is showing, allowing search engines to give users better results when performing an image search.

Alt text is a great place to include your main keyword to improve your image search ranking for that term. However, it is important to use appropriate text that actually describes your image. You should not include keywords if they are not relevant to the image being displayed, and if it doesn’t describe the image. If you do this, it could do more harm than good and negatively affect your website’s SEO.

3. For the visually impaired – The visually impaired tend to use screen readers in order to browse web pages. These screen readers will identify and interpret what is being displayed on their screen. Alt text is needed to explain and describe to people using screen readers what is on your page. For this reason, it is important to convey contextual information that will explain the image in more detail.

What made me think about it was a thumbnail on a YouTube recommended video I saw last night.  The title of the vid was hilariously truncated, so I took a screenshot of it as well as the title tag that appeared when I placed my cursor on it:

In this case, the title tag added the complete title of the video...thank goodness.

Here's the video if you want to watch it.  I never did;  I was too busy LMAO.