Alt Tags Text - How Alternative Text can help Drive Traffic to your Website
Karl Kasca
Alt Tags Text - How alternative text can help drive traffic to your
website
Using alternative text for images can supercharge your findability in Google and other search engines. Here's why...
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- Note: Since
there may be more info of interest/use on the page below, you should at
least skim it quickly in addition to viewing the Video below.
Index
Why Alt Tags Text for Images can
Supercharge Your Website's Findability in Search Engines
- Images themselves don't give search engines much
information (text) other than their file names, which might be
something obscure/meaningless (to search engines or people).
- If your Home page has mostly images and very
little text (content), then the search engines don't have much
information (text) to grab onto and index.
- And if your web pages do have text, then using Alt Text for
images just adds more: And More content is better.
- Also, you can use keywords/phrases in your Alt Tags Text.
- However, don't use too many key words in Alt tags, or it
may be considered "keyword stuffing" and lower your page's ranking.
- What's the limit on the
number of words in your alt text?
Other
Reasons for Using Alt Tags Text (It's
the law!)
- Adding Alt Text gives search engines text to index and has
the added benefit of helping those who are vision impaired by giving
them some "alternative text" to read instead of the image (which they
can't see/view).
- You're giving visually challenged individuals "alternative"
text so they can see something in place of the image they can't view.
- *Not* using Alt Tags can actually be against the law in
some instances (and that's in both the US and EU).
- In fact Target famously lost a court case for now having an
accessible website.
- What the Target Accessibility Lawsuit Ruling
Means to Online Marketers
- "According to the initial complaint, the biggest problem
with the site was its lack of alt-tags for images." - Yikes!
- Assure that every image uses the "Alt" (alternative graphic
image) tag description for each image.
- See Target's Assistive Guidelines under the Resources below
for more on this.
Action Steps
- Go to your webpage, e.g., Target's home page: www.target.com.
- From your browser's menu bar select:
- View > Source (for Internet Explorer)
- View > Page Source (for Mozilla Firefox)
- Press <Ctrl> + F (for "Find") or
<Alt> + E + F (for Alt Edit Find)
- Use Command or Apple key for MACs (instead of
<Ctrl> key).
- Type in "jpg"
- Or "gif", or "logo", or "alt".
- Once you find the reference to the image, look for "alt="
and see if there's any text after the equal sign.
- If there isn't any text, then add some.
- Add several words...up to a short sentence.
- Use
less than 20 words.
- You can use keywords/phrases, but don't stuff
the sentence with keywords.
- See the Matt Cutts video above for examples of keyword
stuffing.
Example
If you find this for Targets logo:
<a href="http://target.com"><img
src="images/logo.gif" width="115" height="77" border="0"
alt="Target"></a>
You could use this Alt Text instead:
<a href="http://target.com"><img
src="images/logo.gif" width="115" height="77" border="0"
alt="Image of
Target's Bullseye logo"></a>
Video
on Alt Text- How Alternative Text Can Help Drive Traffic To Your Website
Resources
Target Online Assistive Technology Guidelines
(TOATG)
- See pps 24-27 (better
yet, just scroll through the document and see if anything else applies
to your site!).
W3C
Quality Assurance Tip for Webmasters: Use the alt attribute to describe
the function of each visual.
- What are alt attributes useful for?
- What should I put in my alt attribute?
Matt
Cutts Discusses the Importance of alt Tags - YouTube
video
ARTICLE DATE: 06/15/09
REVISED DATE:
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Alt Tags Text - How Alternative Text can help Drive Traffic to your Website
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