Images and graphics may look nice to you and to your human visitors, Search engines however can not see that picture you think is worth a thousand words. Especially when that image is also a hyperlink, or is part of your navigation. Yet you still have the option to specify alternative text to every image, this alternative text is useful in many ways, For visitors with slow internet this alternative text would appear while the image is still being loaded, for those with browser that have images disabled, this is all they see, Also when someone has questions about the image, he could just hang his mouse pointer over the image and the alternative text will show (try moving your mouse over the navigation images on the top panel.

Many page authoring software give you the option of adding the ALT text easily, for example FrontPage lets you do this by double clicking the image, then filling in the TEXT box of Alternative representation.

Other software lets you do this in other ways that are just as easy. Usually by right clicking the image, go to properties and look there.

Alternatively you can do it in the source of the page, The HTML is as follows

You can specify the alternative tag of the picture

<IMG src="image.jpg">

 

<IMG src="image.jpg" ALT="The description of the image or the description of the link that clicking the image would take you to">

Always make sure your alt tags are specified for important images (Not very important for many other images like blank images that are not hyperlinks.