Put ALT tags on all of your graphics

There is a silent battle going on as we speak - a battle on the internet. It's a quiet battle little known to anyone, but the effects on web surfers are tremendous.

This is a battle between web masters and search engines. What's that? A battle? Yep. The important thing to remember is that if you can get your site listed at the top of a search engine for as many keywords as you can, then you will get more hits, and that can translate into more money. Perhaps a lot more money.

You can see the fallout from this battle whenever you search. If you enter something like "Denise Richards" you will pull up hundreds of pornographic sites which have nothing to do with her. In fact, put in just about any term and you will get porno sites, usually lots of them.

So what do people do to get listed near the top? A favorite trick is to include invisible text (the same color as the background, or just one pixel high) on the bottom of the page. There have been reports of some particularly unscrupulous site owners including the entire dictionary in this manner! The smarter search engines check for this now - those sites tend to get zapped.

Another trick is to include lots of keywords at the bottom or top of the page, or to include a "story" which has nothing to do with the site but serves merely to include lots of keywords.

There are many, many other tricks, and the smarter search engines are evolving and becoming better able to deal with this kind of thing. Thus the war goes on.

So how do you get your site listed near the top? Well, what search engines try and do is figure out if your site is legitimate or not based upon certain criteria. What they want to see is:

Meta tags for keywords (description and keywords)
Text
Alt tags on graphics
a title

What are alt tags? This is some text which is to be displayed if the browser does not display graphics. It is considered good practice to include these tags regardless of search engines specifically because many people turn off graphics to improve their surfing speed. This causes something to be displayed instead of just an empty spot.

It's real easy to include alt tags. Look at the example below.

That's all there is to it. Oh yes, remember, if you include the ALT tags it is best to also include the WIDTH and HEIGHT tags (these are a good idea anyway).

Additional Reading

Some Good Design Tips Here are a few tips to help create a better web site.
Contingency Design Be sure and help your visitors, even if they do something wrong. Handle misspellings and errors to get them back on track.
First Things First Before you write one word of HTML code, even before you start your analysis, you must define your purpose.
Who Is Your Audience? Before doing much of anything, you need to understand the group with whom you are communicating. By doing this, you will make your job many times easier.
What Do You Want To Communicate? Once you know who you are talking to, you should take some time to figure out what you want to say.
How Do You Want To Communicate? Now it's time to decide what methods you want to use to communicate your message.
Why Are You Creating A Site? It's important to know why you are creating a web site so you know when you are hitting your target.
How To Get Around Your visitors are more likely to look at your whole site if your navigation scheme is logical and easy to use.
Pulling Them In Deeper You want people to stay for as long as possible on your site. How do you do this? Great content and lots of cross linking.
Put ALT tags on all of your graphics Be sure to include descriptive ALT tags on every image. Many search engines use this data. In addition, this makes your pages better for people who surf without graphics turned on.
Meta-Tags Be sure and set up your meta-tags properly if you want to be found by some search engines. (See also HTML tag reference guide - <META>)

Connect with me

Florish and prosper: Check out The Way To Happiness today

W3CHTML 5.0 W3C CSS