Medium impact · weight 6 · worth up to 1.9 points of the total score
Alt text is how a screen reader describes an image and how a search engine understands it. Missing alt attributes are an accessibility defect and lost image-search traffic at the same time.
Give every content image a short alt describing what it shows. Purely decorative images take an empty alt="".
Check a page for this, and the other 41 checks at once
Title length is in range
Below about 30 characters the strongest on-page signal is left half unused; past about 60 Google truncates the title in the results page and the tail is wasted.
Canonical points at this page
A canonical aimed somewhere else tells Google to index that other URL instead of this one. Done by accident, usually by copying a template, it removes the page from search while everything still looks fine on screen.
Document declares its language
The lang attribute tells screen readers which pronunciation rules to use and helps search engines serve the page to the right audience. Without it a screen reader may read English text with the wrong phonetics.
Meta description length is in range
Descriptions shorter than about 120 characters leave the snippet half empty; past about 160 the end is cut off mid-sentence.
