Understanding Alt Tags

The content that greets visitors to your website is enormously important. The stuff "under the hood" -- the meta language that human visitors don't see -- is also important. We've discussed keywords here before. Once you've gotten your description and keywords set up, you should also think about your alt tags.

Alt tags are descriptions of images. People with limited vision can hear them and know what pictures are on your website. At some pages (like the example below) you can see them when you put your mouse over a picture.

They also tell the search engines, which cannot see pictures, what images are on your page. When people do image searches, alt tags tell the search engines what to offer the searchers.

Many of you have never heard of or thought of alt tags, and many more don't bother using them. This explains the weird stuff you get offered when you do image searches.

Taking the time to create good alt tags can do good things for you:

• They help clarify what your page is about. When you use your keywords in your alt tags, search engines get another opportunity to identify your page with those keywords.
• They let you add keywords that don't fit into your visible on-page text. A jeweler client of mine makes lots of different kinds of jewelry. A list like "pendants, bracelets, earrings" wouldn't fit with the style of her website, but descriptive alt tags on her photographs let her include all those words. The painters I work with could list all the suburbs they serve, but again such a list wouldn't fit the upscale design of their site. By using the locations of the houses in the alt tags on their images, they can include the place names.
• They can draw a different group of customers. While SEOs may complain that most searchers who come to see images just bounce right away again without shopping, I think that isn't always true now, and is changing. As more of us use alt tags well, image searches will become more useful and popular. One of the most popular searches at my educational blog this summer was for "monkey bulletin board." I was top at Google image search, and visitors not only clicked through to look at the bulletin board more closely, but went on to visit the client whose products had been used to create it. Since my blog is about lesson plans, the people who visited through image search were different from the ones who came to the same post through regular search.

So what's a good alt tag? We're talking about keywords here, and the same things I've said about keywords before still apply:

• They have to match the content. Often, web designers will just use the basic keywords of the site. I've even seen the page descriptions being used. This looks shady. If you have a picture of a pendant, the alt tag should call it a pendant, not "first class handmade jewelry." A stock photo of a laughing child should not have your company name. Think how you feel when you do an image search and turn up pictures that seem completely irrelevant to your search. Don't do that to your potential customers.
• They ought to be related to your overall purpose. You can use a picture of a cute puppy and label it "cute puppy." This could bring people to your website. However, unless your goal is to have lots of random visitors with no interest in your goods and services, this isn't going to get you the return on your investment that you want.
• They should be things people are actually searching for. As with all your keywords, the words in your alt tags should be terms that your customers and potential clients might type in at the search engines. If people looking for your services won't be searching for "Five years in the same location" (and they won't), then that shouldn't be your alt tag. Use a word or phrase that someone will actually search for, and you increase your chances of being found enormously.

How do you create alt tags? It's easy. Go to the HTML of your page and find the image. It will begin with "a href..." Then there'll be a string starting with "src" and then you'll see "alt=" That's the place to put your alt tag. You can just type in "cute puppy" or whatever you've decided on in place of whatever follows the term "alt=" even if it's an empty space. This may be the kind of task you let your webmaster do for you. In that case, you should be able simply to ask to have your alt tags changed.

Then just watch your site statistics and see how many more people are visiting you through image search.

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