Image ALT Tags and Search Engine Optimization

There are many little tricks you can utilize to give your site a boost in the search engines. One thing you can do to help your SEO strategy is to properly use image ALT tags on all of the graphics and photos on your web pages.

The ALT attribute was designed for you to enter text telling your site visitors what your graphic is about in case it did not load or they had images turned off. That way, if someone can’t see your image, they can read a few lines of text that tells them what the image is about.

It doesn’t happen often, but it is fairly common for your images not to load on occasion. It may have something to do with your server being down, you may have messed up the code, or it might be due to the type of browser your visitor is using. Sometimes data gets dropped and images just don’t load, but display the standard red X instead.

Therefore using ALT tags for your images should already be one of the best practices that you follow with your website, ensuring that it’s accessible for every person and in all situations. However, for the person interested in SEO you can make use of the ALT attribute to provide additional benefits.

The ALT tag provides an excellent opportunity to include more of your targeted keywords and phrases into your page content. If you write a brief sentence describing every image on your page using your targeted keywords and phrases, you are easily adding more keyword inclusion to your content.

The ALT tags provide a way for you to add more keyword phrases to your web pages without resorting to keyword stuffing or making your site look spammy. Because they are not part of your page content, the extra keywords don’t work against you. That’s why using these image tags should be an important part of your SEO strategy.

Another great benefit is that besides adding more relevant keywords to your page coding, you also will allow yourself to be found in the image search results for a particular query. Now when people check out the images for a product or topic, you are giving yourself a great shot at being shown in those rankings as well.

In this way you can continue to grow your online presence. You will actually be able to drive more traffic to your website as a result of these image searches. People will see a displayed image for a particular search, and either want to see the full size version or want to learn more about its usage and the website that has it.

Using ALT image tags benefits both you and your site visitors. They will still get your message even if your images do not load. You will enjoy the additional search engine listings and SEO benefits that using image ALT tags brings. That is why you should make this technique an essential part of your SEO strategy.

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Using H1 Text for Search Engine Optimization

The use of different display and formatting tags throughout your content can help give you an easy SEO boost. One formatting tag that is particularly important is the H1 title or headline tag. It’s the highest level of formatting, and therefore can carry some interesting benefits for your website.

The way that the H1 tag is traditionally used is to differentiate your headline or title from the rest of your content. In this way visitors can easily make a visual differentiation and can see what your page is all about. However, as mentioned above, formatting tags often bring to the table an additional meaning besides the visual effect that they provide.

The traditional usage of formatting tags makes a visual change to a page, and something ends up standing out as different or more important for the visitor. This visual change however was produced by a specific formatting tag, such as H1, and the search engines recognize these tags and assign the appropriate relevance to them that comes with the associated visual differences.

You can therefore think of the H1 attribute being the single most important piece of formatted text on any given page. Because of this meaning, it can also be an invaluable way to help target your visitors and get ranked in the search engines through SEO.

Consider that if a certain piece of text is highlighted as the single most important element of your page, then it is a fantastic chance to include you most important keywords or phrases for a particular page. If you include the most important keyword for each page of your website in the included H1 tag, then you are saying that the most important thing on those pages is the keyword itself.

Therefore you are giving yourself a huge boost in the search engines, as you highly associate all of your pages with the specific keywords you are targeting for them. It’s a quick, easy and efficient way to further gain an edge in the world of SEO, and it’s another use of formatting tags for SEO purposes.

Some people have questioned whether or not the H1 title tag is still effective for SEO. This is because various people have completed conflicting studies showing that display tags such as this no longer produce any noticeable change in rankings for a particular web page.

However, the truth is that these results have not been shown to be conclusive. Instead of stopping your use of H1 text for SEO purposes, you must remember that SEO is both fluid and dynamic. In other words, you have to stay on your toes and be ready to change your game plan at any time. But as of now, H1 is still a highly successful and easily deployed SEO strategy.

When used correctly, the H1 tag will enable you to highlight the most important keywords and phrases for each page of your website. It’s an easy to gain a higher association with a particular phrase or two, and it will help you climb through the rankings effectively.

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