What the heck are alt tags anyway? If you just place your cursor over one of our graphic ads in the sidebar for a second you'll see - for instance hold your cursor over the ad for "IDEAL" - you'll notice the words
'IDEAL' a newsletter for VA's pop up.
These are alt tags.
Search engines can't see your pictures, and for that matter neither can visually impaired internet users - one way you can help both parties better understand what your website is about is to place alt tags in ALL of your images.
Alt tags should give a good, basic description of whatever the image actually IS. For instance, our VA directory ad in the sidebar has an alt tag that is descriptive enough that search engine spiders understand what the image represents. And it doesn't hurt at all that the alt tag includes a few solid keywords.
As a Virtual Assistant with a business website you're one of hundreds, maybe thousands, and that number is growing every day - so one small thing you can do to help increase your own site's search results is to go through your site and add alt tags to your images. This is one way you can optimize your website from the inside out.
Here's how:
Get into your website code or template and wherever you see
<img src="www.yourimagelocationaddr ess.com">
add this little bit of info to the code
alt="ENTER DESCRIPTIVE TAG HERE"
so it looks like this instead:
<img src="www.yourimagelocationaddr ess.com" alt="
ENTER DESCRIPTIVE TAG HERE" />
And you're all set.
Do this for your logo and any other images you use on your site; and be sure to include good keywords (
Virtual Assistant is the most obvious, but there are other variations on this that you can use...)
Any questions on this? Just reply to the thread
