SEO Tip: Don't Forget About the ALT= Tag

A while back I wrote a post about 'on page' SEO techniques.  In it I failed to mention that you should avoid using images, flash animations, etc., to the exclusion of plain text that includes your primary keywords.  If my website is about snowman ornaments but all it has is a bunch of pictures of snowman ornaments as links, when search engine spiders crawl my site they will have very little to work with to determine its context.

This is because search engines can only read the text (html)  on your website.  They don't have the intelligence to understand the content of an image, flash animation or other graphic used your website.  That is, of course, if you forget to use the ALT= tag in the IMG SRC tag.  The ALT= tag was originally created to give web surfers some idea of what image was supposed to be displayed should their browser be unable to do so.   By placing their cursor over the image box shown when an image fails to display the alternate text would appear in a pop up box describing the content of the image.

However, the ALT= tag also has benefits for SEO in that search engines can and do find the text found in them.  So be sure to utilize the ALT= tag and include appropriate keywords in addition to the text on your website to help the search engines correctly determine the content of your website.  Don't try to stuff the ALT= tag with too many keywords as most search engines will penalize your ranking as a result.

This all came up as I was taking a look at my Google Analytics to see exactly where traffic to my site was coming from.  I noticed that Google image searches were resulting in a decent percentage of my traffic.  So I went to Google and did an image search for my primary keywords 'snowman ornaments'.  It returned two hits for images on my site on the third page of the search results.   That is much higher than my site ranks using the same keywords on a Google Web search.

However, since people can scan image search results much more quickly and easily than text search results they will page further into the results to find what they want.  Being on the third page of image search results was good enough to produce significant traffic to my website.  So, don't forget to use the ALT= tag or you will be ignoring a great way to drive traffic your way!