Don’t Forget Your Alt Tag When Uploading Photos
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, August 6, 2007 Comments (2)
If you use photos on your web pages at all then you’ll have to make them crawlable. The search engines do not crawl photo images. It doesn’t matter if they are .jpg, .gif, or .tiff. They won’t get crawled. So you’ll have to come up with a way to tell the search engines what the photos are about. That’s what your alt tag is for.
The alt tags acts as a sort of description for the photo. It is a text description that should incorporate your keyword so that the search engine knows what the photo is about but also so that you can get another instance of your keyword on your page. Here’s an example of a photo tag with an alt tag:
img src=”http://static.myjewelrybox.com/media/products/2704/08SS8885RUW_01_thumb.jpg” alt=”Ruby gemstone” / align=”left”/
Of course, the above tag is sans the < and the >, but this is what your photo tag looks like.
The first element of the photo tag is img src. This tells the search engines where the original photo is located or where to find the photo. It pinpoints the exact location of the photo image right down to the file. Next, the alt= gives the photo a name or description. The search engines crawl that description and will index the photo according to that description, but they are also looking for an important keyword. If they find one then you get points for that. The align tag simply tells the Internet bunny where to place your photo on the page. It could be aligned right, top, bottom, or you could center the photo even. Whatever you do with your photos, don’t leave off the alt tag. Next to the img src, it’s the most important part of the photo tag.
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Comments (2) Category: SEO
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Comment by randy
Made Tuesday, 7 of August , 2007 at 8:38 am
I have read a great article about image optimization. check it out
Comment by namecritic
Made Tuesday, 7 of August , 2007 at 8:14 pm
Great article Randy. A lot of poeople ignore the surrounding text. It’s the same way with emnedding links into a paragraph. The keywords surrounding the link are important as are the words in the link itself.
The filename of the image being keywords is another great tip for people to remember.
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