Newsletter
| March, 2007 The 'alt' tag Last month I talked to you about organizing your web site to make things easier for you and your users. The added benefit of organizing your site is focusing your message to your target audience for better indexing and give your customers a better understanding of what you do. This month, I'm going to talk about the alt tag. The alt tag actually isn't a tag at all, it's an attribute. I can hear the audience out there saying wha-ha? Let me back up. And now some HTML In HTML content is formated using tags. Tags provide a means for creating links or displaying images. The tag for displaying an image in a web page looks like this: <img="picture.jpg"> Tags can have modifiers that can add more information to the tag like size, color or additional information like 'alt.' These modifiers are called "attributes" and 'alt' is an attribute of the image tag. With me? OK, one more thing. Attributes have values. Values define what is being modified by the attribute. The value of the alt attribute are words that describe the image that is being displayed on your page. Back to the alt tag From here on out, I'll use the word 'tag' in single quotation marks instead of attribute because most people call it the alt 'tag.' So what does the alt, um, 'tag' do I hear you ask. And so you may. There are two reasons the alt 'tag' important The first is, it helps people who use "readers"–a technology that reads and voices what is on the web page. This is often used by blind or otherwise disabled web users. The alt 'tag' allows the reader to tell the user what is on the screen, which is especially important if that image is a link. The other reason is that search engines read it. This creates a great opportunity for additional key words into your site. This is especially great if you participate in programs like Google's Adsense that place pay-per-click ads on the side of your web page. Those ads are automatically placed based on key words in your content. If you have little content but a lot of images, the alt 'tag' is a great way to bring in the kinds of ads you want on your page. Remember, you don't want to put too many words in an alt tag, just enough to describe the image with a few important (preferably) key words. If you don't know how to do the HTML code yourself, you'll need to have someone do it for you. Make sure that you provide a list of all the keywords you want to have placed into the alt 'tag'. Back to the Newsletter page Sign up to get your copy of the Pylon Page |
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