SEO Resources

SEO – Alt Tags

The HTML tags describing an image that appears when the mouse is rolled over the image on a Web page. Helpful for people who view pages in text-only mode. Some search engines look for keywords in ALT tags.

If you use images in your Web pages, its good practice to include Alt text for every image that a visitor to your site will see. ALT tags filled with keywords can also be used to boost your keyword frequency and help you achieve better rankings.

ALT tags also make your site more accessible to visually impaired people using text readers. Even if your Website is content rich, the alt tags allow you to reinforce what is highly important, the key terms, within the content.

The overall impact of using ALT tags, in terms of search engine optimization, is low. As they have become abused by webmasters who fill alt tags with streams of keywords, the major search engines have lowered the importance of ALT tags in their algorithms. However, ALT tags are a required element for standards-based HTML coding. Every image must have an ALT tag, and each ALT tag must be properly implemented.

It’s great news for SEO though, because as long as you don’t “stuff” your images full of keywords, it’s a great way to add targeted keywords to your pages content.

Spiders eat alt tags up because while they can’t “read” an image, they sure can read an alt tag.

A great example of an alt tag is if there was a picture of a brown dog with spots, you would have alt tags for it that said “brown dog with spots”.

ALT tags serve the following functions in seo and web design.

* Make sites accessible to the visually disabled.

*Describe images so that search engines and the disabled can see them.

*Allow keywords to be added to your pages with out cluttering them up.

*They should be used for every image on your site, within reason.

SEO – Meta Tags

If you have a great website that is both creative and resourceful, and you still don’t have enough traffic your web site needs to have meta tag. It doesn’t matter what some search engine expert told you. Fact is that 1000’s of search engines still use your Meta content to tell searchers what your site is about.

What is a meta tag?

The purpose of the Meta optimization tag is twofold: to help the page rank highly for the words that were contained within it, as well as to provide a nice description in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Meta-tags look a little like this one:

< meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />
< META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”Keywords separated by commas”>
< META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Description of the page”>
< META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”FOLLOW,INDEX”>

It should be at the top of your page on EVERY page. I understand you might not be a meta tag expert but that is no excuse. There are websites that already exist and that let you make your meta-tags for free….. With all the bells and whistles.

A good place to generate meta-tags on the fly is http://www.submitcorner.com/Tools/Meta/.

Meta-tags and page titles are really tied in together so don’t overlook your page titles.