Learn SEO Tip – Title Tag or Alt Tag or Both
Do you use a Title Tag or Alt Tag or both on your graphics and photos? I have seen a lot of comments on this subject and suprisingly (at least to me) most people opt to use one or the other but not both. My experience has been that using both tags greatly enhances your SEO efforts if used correctly.
Just a quick recap for those who are new to this subject. The title tag is what you name your photo or graphic and the alt tag is the alternative text that you see when you roll your mouse over an image (not in firefox).
Naming your photos and graphics correctly is very important for your site. For instance the title of a photo should be something like “trucking_jobs_banner1.jpg” rather than DS00911. The use of your site keywords in the title tag makes your images easier to find, leading your website to be easeir to find. Especially if people are searching through Google images. This used to hold true for Yahoo images but it appears that Flickr images are the primary source for image searches.
The alt tag is the text that you write in to support your image. In addition to providing your site with extra keywords for the search engines, there are those rare cases where web surfers have turned off the ability to view images. Instead of having a red X you have your descriptive text show up. Of course as mentioned earlier, when using MS IE you can see the alt text pop up when you run your mouse over the image or photo.
My opinion and experience is to use both tags and take advantage. Be sure to vary your titles and tags slightly so as not to appear to be spamming the system.
