Building a Better Ranking Website: Alt Tags

The Alt tag can help boost a sites ranking and user friendliness.

Oct 12, 2009

Alt tags are an often overlooked but valuable tool in the web site users toolbox. It is important to understand it and use it for SEO general user friendliness.

Alt tags are tags associated with the images of a site. They are the words that will show up if for some reason the pictures don't show up or if the mouse pointer hovers over an image. An image may not show up for several reasons.

They may be slow to load or the web page viewer might have disabled image loading in their browsers. Or the user viewing the site may be impaired and might use an audio based browser.

The Importance of Alt Tags

Whatever the case, if a site has images, then it should also have Alt tags. Not having Alt tags is just wasting valuable space that can be used to provide the viewer with more information. It is also a good spot to add some keywords that can be picked up by search engine crawlers that catalog sites.

Identifying and Labeling ALT Tags.

The Alt tag can be identified in a specific site’s code by looking for the tag that looks like: ALT="...". This tag should be in the image tag: <img></a>.

Inside this area a few keywords should be inserted that describe the image it is associated with. It is important not to put random keywords in the hopes that this will generate better rankings. That is just spamming and the web crawlers that index a site will pick up on that.

Instead, it is advisable to keep the description short. Readers that have graphics disabled will see only one long string of text so it is often a good idea to keep the text to a minimum. At the same time words should be carefully chosen.

It is also important to be descriptive. For example, the alt tag "Strawberry Fields,” could refer to actual fields of berries or to the Beatles' famous song, and could be ambiguous.

The Alt tag is a site attribute that should not be overlooked if one is looking to improve site rankings or make a site more user friendly. Finding and changing them is easy. They can be inserted within any image tag that could use a description.

For these reasons it makes no sense not to include them in a properly optimized site.

The copyright of the article Building a Better Ranking Website: Alt Tags in Website Marketing is owned by Phillip Burghgraef. Permission to republish Building a Better Ranking Website: Alt Tags in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.