Google SEO Tip: The Alt Tag

Computer First acts as a subcontractor for SEO work for several firms.  What always amazes us is how many people miss the basics on their sites, even the ones doing the SEO!  Today I’d like to cover what’s called the “Alt Tag” in the industry.

First off to keep this simple if you hover over this image with your mouse:

Doesn’t do much right?

Now try this one:

You see the text “Computer First Logo” correct?

This is what an alt tag does, for the techy people the code looks like <img src=”http://www.computerfirst.org/itsupportblog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/logo.jpg” alt=”Computer First Logo” width=”234″ height=”73″ />

The other key thing to notice here is the name of the image file “logo.jpg” mean much?  Not really does it?

The simple concept here is that images now come up in Google results to get the traffic from those results you should meet the following criteria:

1. The content (text) around the image should describe the image.
2. The “Alt Tag” should reflect the contents of the image and the content around the image.
3. The name of the file of the image should also match the content, i.e. describe the image.
4. The whole page itself and the content of it should be related to the title of the page and the images within it.

What does this all give you?  Well a damn good spot in Google image search for starters.

We’re still developing our own SEO on the images but to give you an idea have a look at http://www.google.co.uk/images?um=1&hl=en&biw=1659&bih=844&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=site%3Acomputerfirst.org&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

We’re there, were indexed now we just have to tune them to what our clients are searching for and then we get traffic.

I hope this gives you a good insight into how an Alt tag works and a basic understanding of how it relates to Google.  This one subject alone can be very in-depth so be careful if you do use alt tags.  Please don’t stuff them with keywords it’ll end up having the wrong effect on your Google position.