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"7 Days, 7 Secrets, Search Engine Placement Made Simple"
The Only 7 Things You Need to KNOW About SEO
To Get First Page Results At Google and Yahoo"
By Lonn Dugan, Realtor, Head Coach, www.MyRealCoach.com
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DAY 4 Alt Text Tags for Images and Links
Today's reading is short and sweet. As mentioned before, Meta Tags, especially Description and Keyword Tags are thought by some to no longer matter at Google and Yahoo. It is the same with Alt Tags or Alt Text tags for images and links - as well as Spider Food - a technique which we will cover tomorrow. However, most top sites use alt tags, and many SEO experts state that the sites that use these do better than the ones that do not. I believe they count at least a little, and they may count more when they are all congruent (working together).
Alt tags were originally created to help explain what was in the images that might not show up due to browsers reading text only versions of a web page as a result of limited bandwidth. Other Internet users might be using "page reader" software that actually turned the page into spoken language in case of blindness or preference. Webmasters learned that they could stuff these text tags with keywords, sometimes dozens or hundreds of them, and influence the search engines by an apparent increase in keyword density and relevance. By the year 2002, many search engines determined that alt tags were no longer reliable.
Search engines claim they no longer score these alt text tags very highly, but they still do score them. If you use too many, (more than 6 or 8 words) or repeat a word too many times, in a way that has nothing to do with page content, then the search engines may penalize you.
These alt text tags can be entered in the raw html, or in most template based site builders by filling in the TEXT blank or ALT TEXT blank in the link creation dialogue box. I recommend filling in words from your title, description, and keyword choices. I place commas in between each word, as with keywords, but this is not really necessary. Bonus points for making small sentences out of them.
Day 4 Homework:
See Alt Text Tags in Action: Google any major market for the phrase, Real Estate City or City Homes. Place your mouse cursor over just about any photo or link, hold still, and a text box or will pop up. Notice that the words are generally the same as the page title and the first few words on the page.
Next, Make your own alt text tags. Start with home page. Edit your web site. Use image editor or code editor to add alt text tags. Fill in with phrases from the short sentences you made in Description tag out of your title and keywords. Use 6 or 8 words in each location. It is best if the alt text words relate to text in nearby paragraph. Further, do the same with your links, using code editor or link editor in site builder template software. Repeat on interior pages.
If in doubt how to make these on your real estate web site, ask your hosting provider support team. If you need to make alt tags in raw code, google "how to write html code for alt tags". What do they look like in raw html code? See appendices.
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