Using the Image Alt Attribute

If AuroIN is currently working on your SEO campaign you will have noticed that we are very thorough in our approach. Image-alt-tags probably don’t come to mind as a major concern for you, but like so many other features, when they are used correctly it will contribute to a comfortable feeling that your website visitors will experience, that your website belongs to an organization where high professional standards are maintained. In the final analysis this will not be seen as a very important metric, but we feel that it is one that you should know about. When used, the image alt attribute displays a tooltip in Internet Explorer with the words contained in the image alt attribute. Website visitors see the text when they place the mouse over the image. This is obviously a helpful feature, but it is even helpful for visitors who have images turned off. They will see the words in the alt attribute in the place where the image is placed, and for those who use assistive technology to read web pages, the text will be read aloud.

The image alt attribute is used to supply information about the image. The image alt attribute description should solely be a meaningful description of the image. This is not a place to stuff keywords. Not only would this be useless information for visitors who have images turned off, it would also be useless to those visitors who are using some other means to access your website. Needless to say, search engines frown upon keyword stuffing.

The alt attribute should be blank for decorative images, images which are part of your web page’s visual design. There is a temptation to stuff keywords into the alt attribute in this situation, but this should be resisted. We will check your web design for this issue.

Despite the warnings above, we will include keywords in your alt attribute text as part of our on page SEO campaign, but we will make sure that the text is relevant to the image and that the description is useful to those who cannot see the image.

For additional information about SEO Company USA or use this link: http://www.auroin.com/

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