Image ALT Tags For SEO

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.

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.

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.

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.

Using ALT image tags benefits both you and your site visitors. They will still get your message even if your images do not load. You will enjoy the additional search engine listings and SEO benefits that using image ALT tags brings. That is why you should make this technique an essential part of your SEO strategy.

Visit SEO expert Nick Halmonds’ website. To find more useful information on online marketing. Check it out at search engine marketing services at rank fast.