There are many little tricks you can utilize to give your site a boost in the search engines. One thing you can do to help your SEO strategy is to properly use image ALT tags on all of the graphics and photos on your web pages.
The ALT tag contains a description of the graphic. You can enter any information you want, but it makes sense to add text relevant to the graphic. After all, the purpose of the ALT tag is to provide your site visitors with a text description when your images don’t load. That way they know the purpose behind the little red X that should have been an image.
It doesn’t happen often, but it is fairly common for your images not to load on occasion. It may have something to do with your server being down, you may have messed up the code, or it might be due to the type of browser your visitor is using. Sometimes data gets dropped and images just don’t load, but display the standard red X instead.
For that reason, you should get in the habit of using your image ALT tags every time you put new graphics onto your web pages. That way you can still get your point across and your page won’t have blank holes where the graphics should have been. However, image ALT tags have additional SEO benefits as well.
When you enter text into the ALT tag, be sure to include your keyword phrases to give your site a boost with the engines. Most people will never even see your ALT image text since it is only displayed when the images don’t load. The search engines will pick up on them though and use them to help your site rank for search results.
Since the text in ALT tags won’t show up for most people, and only appear when a graphic has failed to load, those extra keywords won’t make your page look spammy. You won’t have to worry about keyword stuffing since the phrases are in your ALT tags and not part of your page content. You can see why this is such a beneficial trick for any webmaster.
Adding the right keywords to your images has another benefit as well. This allows your images to appear in the results on sites like Google’s image search. When someone is searching for images related to your keyword, your image will appear in the results.
When the person sees your image, he may click on it to see a larger version or click onto your website to see what it is about. In this way, using image ALT tags work to bring you more free traffic. If your site has several images, this could work to bring you significant targeted traffic.
Therefore by using effective image ALT tags you will be able to increase your overall SEO, you will be growing your online presence and you will be directly driving more traffic to your website as well. Whenever you use an image, always include an ALT tag as a necessary component to your SEO strategy.
Check out http://www.rankfast.net to find more great resources on Search Engine Optimization. You can also check out our advanced link building and in-depth website seo analysis services.
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