Image ALT Attributes for Search Engine Optimization
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.
The importance of this is that different browsers display things differently, which is especially true today with the prevalence of mobile web browsing. Additionally, sometimes image files get corrupted or called incorrectly and in other cases people who cannot see use aural browsers that read the page to them.
That is one reason using ALT tags is important for your web site. That way everyone can understand what your page is saying even if the graphics are missing. Without ALT tags, your site visitors would have no idea what your site is about. What’s even better is that using ALT tags have SEO benefits as well.
By adding text to your images, you are able to add more keywords to your web pages which can help you rank better in the search engines. When you enter a sentence or two into the tag to describe your graphic, be sure to include your keyword phrases in a natural way so it acts as relevant content on your page.
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.
Another reason using image ALT tags is great for SEO is because it makes your images come up in image search results for those terms. So when web surfers search Google images or another image search site, your website has a chance of getting additional exposure it might not otherwise get to take advantage of.
Using image ALT tags can actually work in your favor to bring you more free search engine traffic because of your placement in image search engines and also because you have more keywords on your website. If your images are interesting or compelling, a web surfer may just click on it to see what your website is about. Without image tags, your images may not even show up in the search results.
In this way, you are able to benefit from using image ALT tags. This SEO trick should be one that you always use when placing images on your site. It not only benefits you but it benefits your site visitors when your graphics don’t load so it is a win-win for everyone.
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