Tag, Title, Alt, Whats It All About?

When creating articles or blog posts for the search engines, aka Google, adding a few images, alt tags, title tags and anchor text links to your posts can be very beneficial. This not only benefits your search placements and optimization, it also benefits readers of the post and the other site or page you are linking to.

Its a win, win, win situation.

For those who dont know what alt and title tags are, let me explain.

Hover over the image below and you will see the alternative (alt) text. This helps your readers understand what the image is about, and also helps them if they have images turned off in their browser. (for faster loading pages).

Google also counts the alt tag when they index a page. This is useful when trying to rank higher for a certain keyword. Ie, use the keyword, or phrase in the title of your post, mention it in the first paragraph and last paragraph, in the alt text of an image and possibly in the title tag of a url.

The Title tag is used to add text when you hover over a link on a webpage…

Lets take a quick example of this:

"I have just written a very large article about making money with clickbank. It includes niche research, understanding your audience, choosing a topic for your ebook, using autoresponders, finding affiliates, using clickbank, using affiliate elite and many more promotional ideas to help you make money using clickbank"

So, what have I done in this paragraph? Well… I have linked to my own making money with clickbank article on this site, which gives more weight to my own article, I have also included the title tag in the anchor text so when you hover over it, you see alternative text. Google will also pick this text up.

Here is the HTML for the title tag:

<a target="_blank" href="http://ryanshamus.com/2008/01/15/make-money-with-clickbank/" title="Make Money With Clickbank">making money with clickbank</a>.

Here is the HTML for the alt text under the image:

<img alt="Congratulations, Can you see the benefit of using alt tags in images?" hspace="4" width="350" align="right" vspace="4" border="0" src="Link-to-my-image.jpg" />

Please note, you can just use the alt text for the image and link. It tends to work the same, but for some reason I prefer to use the title tag for links and alt for images.

I have tried this strategy out before. I took a keyphrase with very low competition and only used the keyphrase in the alt text of my images and title tag of my links. I ranked at the top for that keyphrase very quickly as Google reads this as text.

Hope you can see the benefits of using title and alt tags in your posts or articles. It takes a few extra minutes of work to add them, but its definately worth it. Unfortunately, as you will see when you read through my posts, I dont always use them either. I tend to use them if I am optimizing a web page to rank higher in the search engines and for a better user experience.

If you find this post of use, please feel free to send it to a friend, stumble, digg or just bookmark it for future use. I appreciate it!