Search Engine Optimization Vol. 2: Image ALT Tags
In our last article we looked in-depth into the world of META tags. Hopefully after reading that you’re on the way to getting your site listed at the top of the search results. As promised, this time were going to take a close look at Image ALT tags, the often ignored but oh-so-important tag that is nothing short of a necessity for all websites.
Image ALT Tags
The ALT stands for alternative and is basically a way for search engines to be able to "see" and "read" your images. When a search engine spider crawls a website it is only taking in the HTML source code of the page and therefore only pays attention to the binary data of the page, not the way it is rendered or how it looks in the browser. For that reason when a search engine runs into an image it doesn’t see this:
It sees this:
So if you’re using an image for a logo or a diagram don’t you think that the data in that graphic is important for the search engines to index? You bet. This is where ALT tags come in. You can’t tell the spider what the image looks like, but you can give it a simple description of the image that the spider can index. Let’s take a look at what an ALT tag looks like.
In reality there is no such thing as an ALT tag. ALT is actually an attribute of the <IMG> tag which displays the image. So to be correct, we’re talking about how to use the ALT attribute of the <IMG> tag to increase search engine rankings.
Here’s what it looks like.
Pretty simple eh? It really is that simple. The main thing to keep in mind with your alt attribute is that the search engines have began to place less weight on the alt attribute up front. They’re using relevancy algorithms to determine how related the image is to the content and giving it more weight if it’s highly related and less weight if it’s not related. You’ll want to make sure that you alt attribute is related to the content that the image is being placed in. In the case of a logo it is self supporting and isn’t necessarily part of a pages content.
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