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Unlock the potential of Image Alt Tags for increased traffic and higher rankings
By Matthew Ross Harris, January 10th, 2008
It has come to my attention that one of the often overlooked SEO techniques is the proper use of the Image Alt Tag.
We all know (or should know by now) the value of adding relevant keywords to title tags, within text links and in
body copy, but we sometimes (at least I used to) forget about the Image Alt tags.
Many of my clients are involved in selling apparel items online. With many of these items, the photography is
critical. If something looks bad in the photo fewer people will purchase the item. (This is particularly the
case with apparel) One of the top traffic sources for these client's sites (usually coming in somewhere between
7th and 10th place) has recently become "images.google.com/referral".
People are shopping using Google Images. Shoppers have realized that they
can view similar products images from many sites at once if they simply click over to "images" on the Google
results page. If an image doesn't have a properly written Image Alt Tag, the image will not
show up on Google Image Search (How else would Google know what the image is?). Having written
descriptive, honest, keyword rich Image Alt tags has open up a whole new traffic channel for my clients.
If the site is using a product database for inventory management simply adding a field for the alt tag that
includes the product title will usually do the trick. If you want to go one stop further, make the field
editable and add more in depth product descriptions. As a general rule of thumb, if you are selling brand
name products, always include the brand name and the style name in the Image Alt Tag.
This technique will also tie in well with some of the changes that are going on at Google:
(see Alex Cleanthous article: click here)
In terms of overall search results this technique can only help. I always tell my clients that as
long as you are being honest and that the content is relevant there should never be a problem. (See Matt Cutts video)
My guess is that the potential inbound traffic generated from "images.google.com/referral" would
also improve your overall search results.
Matt Cutts, Google's Anti Spam guru, has recently posted a video about this:
click here
The bottom line: if the images have relevance to the page content, always include keyword-rich descriptive Alt Tags.
Hope this was informative!
Best,
Matthew Ross Harris
President of Medium Well Inc.
www.mediumwell.com
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