Alt Tags

Using ALT tags on images to help increase search engine visibility is a controversial topic, and since early in 2006, most experts have been claiming that ALT tags are now worthless in improving SERPS rankings in the search engines.

However, I do recommend to clients that every page they wish to rank still have at least one image on the page with a keyword relevant ALT tag.

The ALT tag is displayed by hovering your mouse over an image in Internet Explorer. The text that appears in the little yellow box is the results of an ALT tag in the HTML of the webpage.
Common sense tells me that if ALT tags are indexed, then they’re examined by search engines and should be created with SEO in mind. It certainly can do to you in no harm at all to use ALT tags in the strategy for which they were intended, and that’s the reason why I continue to use them to this day.

Since search engines do not reveal all of the specifics of how rankings are determined, we need to examine what we do know about rankings. For example, relevance is critical. All content should be relevant to your website and helpful to the user, and an ALT tag can add helpful information to the webpage.

you may not know this, but one purpose of an ALT tag is to describe the image to a sight impaired visitor. If a blind person is using your site with audio software, the ALT tags get read out loud, so you want to consider that when you’re writing them. you don’t want to stuff in so many keywords that will sound artificial.

If I’m examining a website and hover over an image, I can see more info about it from the ALT tag. If I hover over the image and the ALT tag displays, ‘BlahBlah123.JPEG’ , then I will not have gained any information about the image and so the image becomes unimportant.

If, however, the ALT tag displays ‘Widget Company Logo by ABC Designs’, then I now have relevant information about the graphic that first caught my attention.

With the introduction of Google’s Universal Search, images have begun showing up in the rankings more frequently. Almost always, you’ll see that any image showing up in the SERPS will have an ALT tag included at it’s original source, and these days, it’s not uncommon to find that the ALT tag includes the word “picture” too!

It communicates professionalism since they are not only are informed of ALT tags, but took the time to use them , they’re also devoted to buyers, they aren’t a fly by night organization, and are aware of small details. You can communicate all of that from a small yellow ALT tag box.

Limit your description to 1 or 2 sentences, and include two to three relevant keywords if appropriate. Do not stuff your ALT tags with keywords! Spiders will recognize your keyword stuffing and give your internet site a lower ranking. They could also put your internet site on the tail end of a very long waiting list of sites waiting to be recrawled.

Dishonest SEO may pay off quickly for some, but with the risk of being forbidden from a search engine, it isn’t a smart decision to use grey or black hat SEO strategies. Use an AlT tag to describe the image, and if there are no keywords that make sense, then just leave them out entirely.