Google and SEO consultants recommend adding text to the ALT tag of every image.
While this can be useful for adding content to feed the search spider, it should not be compulsory. Some people speculate that it may have something to do with security checks with regard to images and virus attempts of days gone by, but web browsers have been fixed for those vulnerabilities, and today in a lot of situations use of the ALT tag can be a right pain in the butt.
Imagine a web page that uses a CSS style sheet and designer only wants to define the font style once and have it apply for the whole table set or table cell. So long as paragraphs are broken by a double page break then the CSS setting will apply to all of the text. But if so much as one paragraph break is used then the CSS setting will broken at that spot, which can make the text look extremely ugly and totally unprofessional.
Now imagine that instead of using bullet points which not only break the CSS sequence as described above but also creates some spacing aberrations, especially between different browser types, that we now use an image as the bullet point.
Now imagine what that page will look like if the page download is not completed to include the images and the image source has text in the ALT tag... the result will be one of the ugliest web pages that you are likely to see. To see an example of what this can look like with any web page try turning off the option that enables images to be visible.
The above mentioned method used with CSS style sheets is used by many professional web designers and may not be known to amateur designers such as those programming algorithms for search engines.
