Using Alt Tags to Drive More Traffic

If you’ve ever looked at the backend of a website, you’d see that there is a whole bunch of code. More importantly, you’ll see that there are a lot of things that you can change a little bit to make your site rank even better than it did before. This is called on-site SEO. You go in and you make alterations to the keywords you use or the use of the <strong> tags, for example. Deciding where to start is probably the hardest part, so here’s a good idea on where to start.

We’ve been spending a ton of time talking about all sorts of graphic design and things of that nature. You’re adding images to your site, making it so that it is tremendously appealing. What you’re going to want to do is go into the code and make sure you add an “Alt” tag to the image. To see what an alt tag looks like, look here:

<img src=”image.gif” alt=” Rocky Patel 1990 Cigar.” />

You’ll see that you’d throw the image URL between the quotes after src, but you’d throw in a little description after the alt. That description is how the search engines are able to determine what that image is about. Search engines can’t actually see anything. They only read keywords and code to determine what is going on. So, when they happen across an image, the first thing the bot does is look at the alt tag to see what’s going on. They’d see, in this case, Rocky Patel 1990 and that would be a keyword you’d potentially rank for.

So, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Great, let’s throw a bunch of different keywords in there to rank for them.” That used to work. However, search engines got smart, which they typically did, and began to punish for alt tag spamming. So, the trick to getting that little extra push to your site from your image is to use a very basic description. If the image is of a particular cigar, only use the name of that particular cigar. Don’t throw in other names.

Alt tags don’t provide much anymore because of how people abused them. However, they still do something. Add in the fact that there is another fifty five million (exaggeration) ways of optimizing your site, this is just one way of ensuring that you get even a few more people to your site. A few people a day more is the start of a positive SEO campaign.