Whether you’re a commercial blogger or you simply want to increase the presence of your service pages in the SERPs, you’ll need to consider the value of images to search engines.

1. Readability
As you craft your site pages or blog posts, the most important thing you’ll need to factor in is user experience. Google places a high emphasis on retrieving results that their users will want to read, so you must cater to those readers with what you provide.

A lot of people are turned off by a giant wall of text when they arrive on a landing page. The trick is to make the content you’re delivering as aesthetic and easy to read as possible. One way to do this is to use high-quality images that are relevant to your topic to break up the text.

2. Accessibility
Just as it takes some careful forethought and planning to make a building accessible to handicapped individuals, the same courtesy should be applied to websites. There are internet users out there who are visually impaired—how well are you attending to their needs? All it takes is a simple alt tag on your image to increase the user experience for this demographic.

3. Indexability
There is one other advantage to alt tags aside from increasing the usability of your site to the visually impaired. When a web crawler moves through your site, indexing and looking at content, the alt tag provides even more content for it to see. As opposed to images without such descriptors, your design will be elevating and supplementing your content. This lends your site more credibility, a better user experience score, and perhaps even a presence in Google Images search.