Website Marketing - Surefire Design

What are alt tags and why are we telling you to do them?

Alt tags are alternative text for images in the content of your website.
They had their origins way back in the early days of the internet when some browsers didn’t display images. The text literally displayed to show people what image would have been there! But nowadays you should be interested in them because they provides Google with useful information about the subject matter of the image.

Google uses this information to help determine the best image to return for a user’s query when they are searching in Google images.
With image search, just as with web search, Google’s goal is to provide the best and most relevant search results to users. The filename is also important in giving Google clues about the subject matter of the image. So its worth considering renaming image files before you upload them to your website.

For example, swimming-with-the-dolphins-in-christchurch.jpg is a lot more informative than IMG00023.JPG.

So what is the task this week?

1 Check one page per day on your website, or 5 minutes per day.
2 For each image on the page in the editor, right click on the image and select Image Properties, complete the Alternative Text field and click OK. Here is a good example of size and content for alt text - “Christchurch activities - swimming with the dolphins”.

This is just in case, as I’m amazed at how many people are simply not aware of Google Images for searching.

If you are one of those people browse to http://images.google.com/ right now!

Google images organises the images on the internet just like it does websites, and you can search in the normal way with keywords and phrases.
Read this weeks DO#3 on image alt tags on your website. This is why!

Searching by images can be a very efficient way to find companies by visually scanning for a logo you know, or for finding a product online by simply glancing down the page. Here are a few advanced tricks -

For extra large images like wallpapers add &imgsz=huge.

Want to search for just peoples’ faces? Add &imgtype=face

To restrict your Google image search for only free public domain images add this parameter to your image search results url – &as_rights=(cc_publicdomain|cc_attribute).-(cc_noncommercial|cc_nonderived)