Image alt text: describing the photo to Google and to guests who cannot see it.
A park website is mostly photos, and to a search engine or a screen reader a photo with no description is a blank. Alt text is the sentence that describes it. It is required for accessibility, it puts your park in image search, and it is missing on nearly every builder site we see.
IN ONE PARAGRAPH
Alt text is a short description of an image written into the page's code. Screen readers speak it to blind and low-vision visitors, which makes it an accessibility requirement. Search engines read it to understand the image and to rank it in image search, where a lot of "RV park [town]" searching happens on phones. A good alt is a plain sentence about what is in the picture: "Pull-through RV site with a picnic table and the Collegiate Peaks behind." We list every image that is missing alt text or has meaningless alt like "image1.jpg."
What alt text is
In the code: <img src="river-sites.jpg" alt="Riverfront RV sites along the Arkansas River at Snowy Peaks RV Park">. If the image fails to load, the alt shows instead. Screen readers read it aloud. Google reads it to decide what the image shows and whether to show it in image results, and it counts toward what the page is about.
What it looks like on a park website
- No alt on any image, because the builder does not prompt for it.
- Alt that is the filename: "IMG_4821.jpg" or "hero-banner-final-v2."
- Alt that is a keyword list: "RV park camping campground Colorado."
- The same alt on every image: the park's name.
- Decorative images, like a divider graphic, with long alt text that a screen reader has to read out for no reason.
What a good one says
What is in the picture, in one plain sentence, with the park or the place when it is relevant. "The bathhouse at Willow Lake RV Park, with four private showers." "A fifth wheel on a pull-through site at sunset." "The office and camp store at Grizzly RV Park, a block from the west entrance to Yellowstone." Not a keyword pile. Not the filename. For purely decorative images, an empty alt, alt="", so screen readers skip them.
What it costs a park
Two things. Guests using screen readers cannot tell what the park looks like, which is a real group of travelers and, for some businesses, a legal exposure under accessibility rules. And image search: a large share of "RV park near [town]" searches on phones show an image strip, and parks whose photos carry real descriptions appear in it. A park with two hundred beautiful photos and no alt text is invisible there.
How to check your own site
- Right-click any photo on your site and choose Inspect. Look for alt="..." in the highlighted line.
- If it is missing, empty on a real photo, or a filename, it needs writing.
- Google's free Lighthouse tool, in Chrome under More Tools, lists every image missing alt on a page.
What we do about it
Every image on a site we build has alt text written for it, describing what is in the frame and naming the park where it fits. Decorative images get empty alt so they are skipped. It is a small habit that adds up across a hundred photos, and it is one of the fixes we make on any site we take over without being asked.
Questions about this.
What should the alt text on an RV park photo say?
What is in the picture, in one plain sentence: the site type, the view, the building, and the park name when it helps. Not a keyword list and not the filename.
Does alt text help SEO?
Yes. It tells search engines what the image shows, it puts photos into image search, and it adds to what the page is about. It is also required for accessibility.
Should every image have alt text?
Every meaningful image should. Purely decorative graphics should have an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them.
How do I find images missing alt text?
Inspect an image in the browser and look for the alt attribute, or run Google's free Lighthouse tool on the page, which lists every image without one.
Want this checked on your park site?
Send us the address. We run the full check and tell you what we found, in plain words. SEO for parks starts at $250 a month.
Part of the RV park SEO guide, section: The technical check. Previous: Dead placeholder links: the buttons that go nowhere. Next: Duplicate titles and descriptions: when Google cannot tell your pages apart.