Search Engine Optimization Help & Resources

How to use Image Alt Tags for Search Engine Optimization

If your unfamiliar with the term Image ALT Tag, its a piece of code that describes an image on a website. This description is embedded in the website’s coding Here is an example of html code, where it says “insert text here” is where you want to place descriptive text about the image or important keywords from your site.

<img src=”../../images/picture.gif” alt=”insert text here”>

If your site was about Search Engine Optimization, your image alt text would look like this

<img src=”../../images/picture.gif” alt=”Search Engine Optimization”>

Don’t over abuse the img alt tag!

Many website’s abuse this alt tag, stuffing it with keywords over and over again. The way you want to gage your image alt attribute density (meaning how many times to use a keyword in it), is buy the overall density of the keyword on the page. So if your keyword is “SEO” and the page density is 4.0%, then try to have “SEO” present in about 4-8% of your image alt tags.

Title tag all of your links

When you place a link on your website make sure to give it a title. Doing so gives search engine spiders one more spot to find your keywords. Make sure to describe whats on the other end of the link, using keywords from your site as the title text. Make sure you don’t overdue it (use keywords to many times), switch it up a bit. Many WYSIWYG editors allow you to add a title to a link easily, but if you you have to do it manually here is the code.

Here is a sample link without the title tag

<a href=“firefox.html”><u>Firefox</u>

This one has the title tag of “Firefox”

<a title=“Firefox” href=“firefox.html”><u>Firefox</u>

Run through your site and title everything

It would be in your best interest to run through your website and place title tags on all of your links. It just gives you one more advantage to use to your benefit, why not!

You’ve Gotta Use NoFollow Tags! (“rel=nofollow”)

The way that page rank works, is it flows from page to page and site to site through outbound links (”rel=nofollow” tag can stop this). Outbound links are like the pipelines that page rank flows through. Think about websites being connected together through plumbing pipes and water flowing through them in Page Rank. Every time you link to another site your letting this water (page rank) flow out of your site. There are some sites that you may want to give page rank to. If your website is new you don’t want to give out to much of your page rank value.

So how do you solve this, use “rel=nofollow”?

You can easily block your page rank value from going to another website while still having a link to them. You do this by adding a rel=”nofollow” tag. This way you can still add links that will be useful to your visitors, while keeping all your page rank trapped in your site.

How to add the rel=”nofollow” tag

Here are two examples one link doesn’t have the rel=”nofollow” tag the other does. In the end you want you link to look like the 2nd one.

Example 1.)

Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/”>discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.

That link would be transformed to

Example 2.)

Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.

By utilizing this “rel=nofollow” tag you can maintain all your page rank, without giving any away.