One of the Most Forgotten SEO techniques… did you forget it too?
You know all those nice images on your website? You can use them to help boost rankings. But you have to include an “alt image” tag in the html code.
What’s an “alt image” tag? It’s html code that looks something like this:
img src=”images/company_about.gif” alt=”Joan Damico B2B copywriter & marcom consultant“
The copywriting enclosed in quotes that follows the alt= is what appears when you mouseover an image. It’s also displayed if for some reason the image doesn’t render.
Tools that read web pages to the visually impaired use alt tags. So not only is it a good idea to make your site more accessible, it can also help boost your rankings.
To see if your site’s images are optimized for accessibility and search, right click on a page and look for the img src= tag, and then locate the alt= tag. If there’s no alt tag or the alt tag is empty (looks like this if empty… alt=”" nothing in between the quotation marks), then you’re missing an opportunity to be more accessible and boost search at the same time.
It’s really easy to add alt image tags. Most html editors such as FrontPage and Contribute plus the more robust content management systems have alt image capabilities. Look for it under image properties.
And remember… make your alt tags more effective at boosting rank by using keyword rich copy that’s relevant to the other copy on the page.
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As you mentioned Front Page, I thought I’d pass along the following: We tested Expressions, the new version and while it was alright, we really didn’t see a need to spend the money. However, when we tried to remove it, it was a disaster, as it (a)caused at least one computer to require a “system restore,” and (b)while removed, remains in the “Add Remove Programs” list, no matter what our guru does to remove it from that section.
Great points all; the one thing I need to recommend is that alt tags for things like navigation and spacer images (which shouldn’t be happening if you know what you’re doing anyway) should remain empty. But for navigation images, you want your alt tags to reflect the section of the site it links to, for example: a link to “home” should just say “home,” etc. That makes it easier for screen readers to deal with it without the user needing to hear your business name over and over.
Thanks, Dani… good point. Can you give us examples of some of the code your referring to for navigation images?
If I understand correctly, my logo, which links to the home page, shoud just say “home” in the navigation tag.