| Image ALT Attributes for Search Engine Optimization |
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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 attribute of an image is used to describe what the image is all about. The original purpose is to provide an alternate piece of information to be displayed if the image cannot be displayed or seen. This way when somebody can't see your image, they can see what the purpose or point of the image was. 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. Therefore using ALT tags for your images should already be one of the best practices that you follow with your website, ensuring that it's accessible for every person and in all situations. However, for the person interested in SEO you can make use of the ALT attribute to provide additional benefits. The ALT tag provides an excellent opportunity to include more of your targeted keywords and phrases into your page content. If you write a brief sentence describing every image on your page using your targeted keywords and phrases, you are easily adding more keyword inclusion to your content. Additionally, because these ALT tags don't show up in your normal page content you aren't just keyword stuffing. You won't come up looking like spam at all, and instead just get to smartly include more of your keywords without any negative side effects. Therefore it's an essential SEO strategy 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. 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. About the Author: Get more useful information on online marketing. Check out our affordable and effective SEO services, SEO Tools, Articles and more at Search Marketing Firm at RankFast.net. |