Images and Alts; Your Tag Team For SEO Success

Correct use of Alt Tags and Image Tags

Besides living breathing human beings, (our favourite kind) another website visitor you're certain to experience is a Google robot. "Google-bots" or "spider-bots" as they are often referred to, are search engine algorithm programs that seek out anything new on the Internet and gauge how valuable a web page is to potential visitors. If these bots like what they see, they will push your site upwards in their search pages. The higher up you go, the greater exposure you can expect. 

Tragically, these poor robots are as blind as baseball bats and can't actually appreciate whatever carefully chosen images you have applied to your site to impress folks and catch their eyes. That's where the Alt tags come in. Instead of seeing your website images, the bot army reads the Alt tag instead, where you have carefully explained the content of the picture you used.

As you can see, there is a field in the Image Properties window called "Alternative Text". This is what is known as an Alt or image tag.  Describing what is in the picture helps spider-bots understand what the picture is about. They will ignore pictures with no Alt tag.