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Flashy images can spruce up any site and make it look nice. But some people don’t have the capability of viewing these images, and sometimes images just fail to load. A quick remedy that not only mends these issues, but makes your site more search engine friendly, is the alt tag.

Alt tags are HTML tags that describe the images they’re included with. Sometimes when you hover your cursor over an image on a website, the alt tag displays. In HTML, alt tags are placed inside the <img> tags. If you have a picture of some cats and you want your alt tag to be “Popular Cat Breeds,” your HTML code might look something like this:

There’s more than one reason why you should use alt tags. Some people are visually impaired and have to use text readers that read the words of web pages out loud. And many people disable image display in their browsers to save loading time. If you use alt tags, a visitor will still have an idea of what your images are.

Another reason to use alt tags is that they improve your site’s search engine optimization. Search engines determine a site’s ranking by reviewing the site’s text. The search engine crawlers will skip over every element that doesn’t contain text. So unless your images include alt tags, they will fall on blind eyes. For every image on your site, choose one keyword that is relevant to your image and use it in your alt tag. Resist the urge to stuff your tags full of keywords. Search engines don’t like spam, and to visitors using text readers, keyword stuffing will be extremely annoying. So choose one relevant keyword that describes your image, and keep your alt tag short.

The alt tag is a frequently forgotten element in web design, despite how easy it is to use. Just by including a brief description containing a relevant keyword with each image on your site, you are making your site friendlier to both visitors and search engines. If you want your site to be the best that it can be, use alt tags.