If you venture deeper into search engine optimisation territory, you will encounter commentary about keyword density, relevance, stemming and so on. And, by then, you will most probably either retreat back to your writing zone or plunge on into the inner depths of search engine optimisation.
Either way, you will realise what matters most in the search engine optimisation realm is the relevance of your content. And, if it’s not relevant (to readers or searchers), it simply isn’t working in any case!
And, for those who may suggest the contents of Keyword and Description Tags are like search engine optimisation magic bullets, stop! This, at the moment, is simply not the case. I say again, it’s the visible words that matter most.
PS: To find out more about search engines and optimisation, a good place to start is Search Engine Watch:
ALT TEXT
< IMG SRC=" imagename.gif" WIDTH=" 000" HEIGHT=" 000" BORDER=" 0" ALT=” The Guide to Writing & Editing Online” >
Alternative text is inserted in the code of pages to describe image content. You can liken it to a caption the browser displays when the reader does not want to or cannot see the pictures presented in a web page. It also appears as a label when a mouse is rolled over an image on a web page.
Since many search engines consider alternative text when indexing pages, using alt text containing relevant key phrases during search engine optimisation can improve the search engine ranking of the page for those words.
Of course, you will only be able to influence this if you know what images are going to be used with your copy.
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Alt Text is also important from an accessibility perspective. This is because computers cannot interpret images and present them in a meaningful, alternative format.
Alternative text, therefore, gives the computer something to present to the user. This is important for users who have turned off image-loading in their web browsers, those using text-based browsers, and people who are blind and require the use of a screen reader to read the contents of the screen.
More information on accessibility can be found within the website of The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at:
You can also use Bobby™, a comprehensive web accessibility software tool designed to help expose and repair barriers to accessibility and encourage compliance with existing accessibility guidelines:
http://bobby.watchfire.com/
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In the next Search Engine Optimisation post, we’ll cover Off-the-page factors …
