For my first SEO Thursday blog post I will start with a topic that is up to a fair amount of debate. It is the use of Alt tags in SEO.
Now for those of you not fluent in geek let me give you a review of what an alt tag is.
Alt Tag
Back in the day when dial-up connections were super-duper slow a user had to wait a much longer time for websites to load. Alt tags were created as placeholders for images, telling the user what the image should be if it:
1) Didn’t load fast enough.
2) There was an error grabbing the image from the server.
3) If the computer lacked the graphics to view the picture.
4) For some other various reason.
Some web developers can be lazy and just not decide to add in the Alt Tag leaving it empty.
Ex: <img src=”imgname.jpg” w=”600” h=”800” alt””>
Take a look at this and ask yourself what it tells you? Looking at that HTML code can you tell me what the image is?
Search engines cannot see the actual image either, just the code. Leaving that alt tag empty is a waste of perfectly good SEO space! It should be filled with a short and relevant description of the picture. By no means is this a free pass to fill the alt tag with a bunch of keywords “also known as keyword loading”.
In the case of a fence manufacturing company, you would want the HTML code for an image to look like this.
Ex: <img src=”r-10.jpg” w=”600” h=”800” alt=”aluminum fence around a pool”>
Adding a short, concise description of the picture gives search engines something to read. This can help with indexing of images and search term ranking for a specific page.
Do Not Abuse The Alt Tag
Ex:<img src=”imgname.jpg” w=”600” h=”600” alt=”aluminum fence, aluminum fencing, pool fences, privacy fence, best fence, steel fence, vinyl fence”>
This is an example of what not to do. Things like this are considered keyword loading and it is not taken lightly. It can severely hurt your search ranking and can even get you blacklisted from search results.
Matt Cutts has an old posting about proper use of alt tags for those that do not like to read http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbuDpB_BTc
Hope you enjoyed and until next Thursday!
Best Regards,
-The Marketing Ninja
I will give credit to my good friend Brad C.
ReplyDeleteJust to clarify the proper designation for Alt text is not an Alt Tag but Alt Attribute text.
It is commonly mis-referenced from a marketing standpoint and the terms are used interchangeably even though they have different meanings.
Damn you Matt Cutts!