| What
are ALT tags and why should I use them? |
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You
have a web site. Your designer did an excellent job and it
looks great. You have plenty of images, including one containing
your business name, logo and slogan.
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| Though
your site may look fine, it's not optimized to score high with
search engines. Since search engines don't index images, they
won't index any text your web site presents in image format
-- in this case the above-mentioned business name and slogan.
To fix this problem, there are ALT tags, which are basically
images' descriptions. |
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Always
add ALT tags to your images to make sure search engines recognize
all the content on your site. ALT tags filled with keywords
can also be used to boost your keyword frequency and help
you achieve better rankings.
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Note:
ALT tags also make your site more accessible to visually impaired
people using text readers. That's because text readers can't
read images, but can detect text in ALT tags. |
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| Avoid
spam |
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Search
engines don't penalize for using ALT tags or even for packing
them with keywords. Still, to be safe you should adhere to
the generally accepted rule of not repeating keywords more
than 3-7 times.
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|
An
Overview
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| ALT
tags: |
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- Describe
images.
- Add
keywords to site text.
- Should
be used for each image.
- Make
sites accessible to the visually impaired.
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