Use the "alt" tag to increase traffic

West · #1 (**permalink**) 06-26-2008, 08:56 AM

I came across a good piece of advice on the SBI forum and wanted to share it here.

For your site's images, make sure you use the "alt" tag in the html code to help people and SE's find you. Before I redesigned my site, I used to give my pictures generic names, and I hardly ever included the alt tag (laziness I guess).

When I redesigned my site, I renamed all of my pictures, making sure each one of them had a specific keyword in it. For example, I have picture of a rubber duck on a few pages. The pic name used to be just "rubber duck". Now the name is "rubber-ducky-baby-shower-theme.jpg", and the alt tag is the same.

For the past couple of months, I've gotten a huge burst in traffic from google images, almost twice as much than google search.

TechieGuy · #2 (**permalink**) 06-26-2008, 09:09 AM

Interesting. I'll have to try it and see what happens. Thanks for the tip.

lisa · #3 (**permalink**) 06-26-2008, 09:24 AM

Good tip, West. I've noticed this too and what's bad is even though I've seen this happen, I STILL don't take the time to tag all my pics. But this is a good reminder for me to make this more of a priority.

Govindji_Patel · #4 (**permalink**) 06-26-2008, 10:56 AM

You can keep a short image name if you want as search engines can not read images so it will read your alt tag instead.
To check what search engine sees in google click on cached on the searched url and click on cached text only and you will see what search engine sees.

webman · #5 (**permalink**) 07-17-2008, 10:53 PM

for Youtube videos, I replace the the word "movie" in the name tag and insert a keyword rich tittle. For instance, "Michael Jackson Bad Music Video".

Thinks that's a good idea?

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