ALT Tags for SEO

The alt tag is an underused SEO tool which can boost your Google rankings. Using images in a post is a great way to make your blog more colourful, clearer and attractive to your visitors. However, as search engines can only read text, even the most beautiful images will not be relevant to them as they cannot understand them. Therefore, text beats images as far as the search engines are concerned.

Luckily, if used correctly it can also be a valuable SEO tool. Every single word or item you insert into articles or blog posts should be optimised for the search engines, to help drive your article to the top of Google. The use of the alt tag can turn your images into search engine friendly content.

DEFINITION:  Alt tag = alternative tag, which defines the image

The alt tag is a text description of the image and will be read by the spiders as they crawl your page. It takes the form of a piece of code to tell the search engines what the image is about.

EXAMPLE: <img src=”image.gif” alt=”Blue Widget”>

Much like with title tags, alt tags are often ignored or incorrectly used by webmasters which gives you a great opportunity to get a leg up on them for your optimistion.

How to use Alt Tags correctly

When adding an image to your post, it is normal that you will insert an image that is relevant to the content of your post. For example, if you are writing an article about the Playstation 3 console, it would make sense to add an image of the console.

Just like we learned in our title tags article, the key to getting your page ranked highly is relevancy. You should therefore give the image an alt tag which is relevant (in this case Playstation 3 console).

If you do this, the search engine spiders will read the text as Playstation 3 console, giving them another nudge that this is what the page is about. If your alt tag matches the content of your article, it will improve your keyword density and boost your SEO score.

Of course, trying to trick Google by using a keyword based alt tag which is not relevant to your article content will not work and may even get you banned, so don’t do it.

Keep your title tag short, sweet, focused around the main keyword of your article and most importantly relevant and soon you will reap the rewards!