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 was designed for you to enter text telling your site visitors what your graphic is about in case it did not load or they had images turned off. That way, if someone can’t see your image, they can read a few lines of text that tells them what the image is about.
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.
By adding text to your images, you are able to add more keywords to your web pages which can help you rank better in the search engines. When you enter a sentence or two into the tag to describe your graphic, be sure to include your keyword phrases in a natural way so it acts as relevant content on your page.
Additionally, because these ALT tags don’t show up in your normal page content you aren’t just keyword stuffing. You won’t come up looking like spam at all, and instead just get to smartly include more of your keywords without any negative side effects. Therefore it’s an essential SEO strategy for any webmaster.
Another great benefit is that besides adding more relevant keywords to your page coding, you also will allow yourself to be found in the image search results for a particular query. Now when people check out the images for a product or topic, you are giving yourself a great shot at being shown in those rankings as well.
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.
In this way, you are able to benefit from using image ALT tags. This SEO trick should be one that you always use when placing images on your site. It not only benefits you but it benefits your site visitors when your graphics don’t load so it is a win-win for everyone.
Nicholas Halmond is the CEO of RankFast.net and is an expert in search engine marketing services.
