The Almighty “alt” Tag

OK so it isn’t really almighty. It will not bring you to search engine nirvana.

Come to think of it, it’s not even really a tag. It’s an HTML image attribute. Still, proper use of “alt” in photos on your site will definitely help your site’s SEO.

Let me explain.

Photos in web pages are inserted using code such as:
<img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/path-to-your-image.jpg” alt=”this is the attribute we’re discussing”/>

An attribute provides information about an HTML element. The only required attributes for photos are “src” and “alt” (the “src” attribute points to the location of the image you want to display). There are plenty of optional attributes, none of which I’ll go into here. What we’re focusing on is “alt”.

Technically, the alt attribute is meant to be alternative text for an image. If the image is not available, the text inside your “alt” tags is displayed instead. Ostensibly, this would be a short description of the image.

That’s no fun.

When search engines scan HTML documents, they take notice of whatever text is inside an image’s “alt” tag. That makes this a great place to artfully insert some keywords. It’s what makes “alt” not almighty, but important to your site’s SEO.

Remember that moderation is key! Be careful to not go overboard and stuff in too many keywords. Overuse of “alt” can backfire and have a negative search engine effect. Control yourself and you’ll soon see search engines start to pick up on what you’ve placed in the sort-of-almighty-alt-attribute-aka-tag.