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 is fairly common for image files to get corrupted while the webpage loads and therefore not display properly. This is especially true for mobile web browsers. There are any number of reasons why your graphics might not load at any given time.
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.
When you enter text into the ALT tag, be sure to include your keyword phrases to give your site a boost with the engines. Most people will never even see your ALT image text since it is only displayed when the images don’t load. The search engines will pick up on them though and use them to help your site rank for search results.
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.
In this way you can continue to grow your online presence. You will actually be able to drive more traffic to your website as a result of these image searches. People will see a displayed image for a particular search, and either want to see the full size version or want to learn more about its usage and the website that has it.
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.
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