Search Engine Strategy - Image ALT Tags
by Robyn Harton
When you're getting your website ready to submit to
search engines, there are a things you can do to help
your site get better rankings. Proper use of image ALT
tags.
First off, what is an image ALT tag anyway? It is a
bit of code that you can use to enter information about
an image on your website. It looks like this in the
code for an image: <img src="button.gif"
alt="This is a button">
Have you ever held your cursor over a photo and seen
a little text box pop up? That's an image ALT tag.
Originally the image ALT tag was created as an alternative
to the image, for people whose web browsers couldn't
show images. Now that virtually all browsers can handle
images, the tag is still there.
So what do you do with ALT tags to help out with search
engine ranking? Why, you fill them with pertinent text!
Search engines use spider robots to read your web page's
HTML and rank it. The image ALT tag that has relevant
text in it is read by these spider robots. Thus, if
you put keywords and pertinent information in your image
ALT tags, to the spider robots you will have more for
ranking purposes.
Use your keywords and keyword phrases in your image
ALT tags and it can significantly increase your ranking
on some search engines.
