Everyone knows how important title tags are for SEO, and for those who don’t, title tags are the headings you see on the browser top when you are on a web page. All SEO content writing companies will stress about the importance of the title tag, but not everyone remembers the Alt Tag, which is equally important.
The Alt Tag is the description that is put up with an image. Some browsers show this text when you hover over the image, but usually, it is the text that shows up in the space where the image is for people who have turned off images for whatever reasons.
Now, images are pretty essential for web pages, since they help break a page and create visual interest. They are also important in helping get across the point of your text’s content visually. Many a times, images show the viewer the product that the web page is promoting. However, when a person turns off the images on his web browser, you lose out on that selling point. Also, there are a number of visually impaired people using the internet who have special web browsers that read out the content of the page to them. Since an image cannot be ‘read’, that image on its own cannot be as effective.
Since these are viewer related problems, you might be wondering how the Alt Tags affect the SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, of a site. The reason is that search engine spiders are just as unable to view the images as the people who have turned them off or people who are visually impaired!
Search Engine spiders or crawlers are bots that trawl through sites checking for the relevance of their content. Because they are a piece of programming, they are effectively blind to images. The only way to make them ‘see’ visual content is by providing relevant alt tags for your images. The spiders read the alt tags to determine how relevant the content is, and rank the page accordingly.
So how does one use Alt Tags to get the maximum benefits? There are two very simple ways.
One is to get relevant Alt Tags for your images. Most search engines are becoming smarter in their analyses of web site content. How relevant your content is becomes a major factor in rankings, and thus, your images (and their descriptions) need to be relevant as well.
The second one is the most obvious, yet most often ignored. Alt Tags are a great way to put in your keywords! Because the search engine spiders look for keywords and their relevance in the site while reading through your site or page, having your keywords as a part of the Alt Tags is something that would definitely help your site’s ranking.
Any good content writing company would be able to help you with catchy, effective Alt Tags for your site which also contain the keywords for that page as well, thus helping your site’s ranking!
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