by hongxing128

Optimize Alt Tags to Improve Increase Search Engine Ranking

Alt tags or alternative tags are the meta tags that are alternatives for images on your pages. These on-page SEO factors have several different functions and are useful for various purposes. One such usage is to increase search engine ranking as well as search engine visibility of your webpages. But, let’s see what exactly they are.

Alternative tags are descriptive phrases that are attached to the images in the source code of your webpages. They could be visible to your readers or invisible. Some people prefer to use text-only browsers or opt to turn off their images for some reasons like having higher internet speed. In such cases, they would see and read such descriptions to know what type of images are used at the page.

How Search Engines Could Care about Alt Tags

Alt tags could both be on-page SEO boosters and off-page SEO boosters. As you know search engines could read text and links. They won’t be able to rank images by their beauty, relevancy, etc. So, to help them understand and rank images at our pages, we should provide some textual data to help them realize what the image is about. It’s not only about helping search engines. We actually help ourselves too!

Search Engine Findability

When we add alternative tags to our images, at the end of the day it’s our images that are optimized and it’s our pages that are found by search engines. What we gain will be search engine ranking and search engine visibility. This benefit could be merely for the images to be found or to help our textual content to be found.

Search Engine Visibility in Image Search

Image search is a function several search engines offer these days. In order to be found and ranked highly for our images, an advisable practice will be to add alt tags to our images. Of course, we should mention our page’s keyword that’s related to that particular image in one way or another. Then, it will both help human visitors and search engines.

Search Engine Ranking for the Keywords

According to some SEO experts, in Google local listings, chances are some sites rank well that have only used their keywords in the alternative tags of their images. The reason is obvious! As search engines aren’t able to discover the relevancy of images to the textual content of a page, they have to read their alt tags. When you provide this, you’ll see the organic SEO results.

Another way to help increase search engine ranking of a page through alt tags is when the image with alt tags is linked to another page. In such cases, these tags will function as off-page SEO factors, like anchor text in the links. So, they help the ranking of a website in two ways:

1) Alt tags help internal linking structure of a website if they are used in linked images within a site.

2) Such tags help increase search engine ranking of a page for the keywords used in the inbound links images.

Final Word about Alt Tags

As alternative tags are easy to manipulate and use for spamming search engines, some SEO experts believe that they won’t have much effect on the search engine ranking of a website and search engines don’t consider them as very important factors in gaining organic SEO results.

I believe that as there are lots of factors involved in search engine ranking, we’d better make use of them all in the right way so that all such so-called minor factors could altogether improve our position in search engines.

www.gsinc.co.uk Why is the Google site command useful and how do you use it? Find out more in the this search engine optimization (SEO) tutorial by Gareth Davies of GSINC Ltd. For more SEO, Link Building and ECommerce tips visit www.gsinc.co.uk
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