HTML ALT Tags for Images

You have to keep in mind that search engines spiders are blind. So when they come across your site the first thing they bump into is usually the header image. Often, most people who build websites don’t name this image using an ALT tag nor do they link the image back to the main index of the site.

There are several benefits to adding HTML ALT attributes to your images:

1. Image ALT tags are indexed by Google and other smaller search machines like Altavista and Teoma. That is why it is a good idea to put meaningful text in the image ALT tags
2. ALT text is displayed by the web browsers when for some reason it is not possible to display the actual image, for example when the image is missing from the web server or if the image loads too slowly and the browser gives up on waiting for the image. This means that if you use ALT tags and the page is not completely loaded, the user will still be able to navigate through your website. In other words the ALT tag could be the difference between the user staying at your website or leaving for the next web page in his search results.
3. ALT text is used by screen readers like JAWS. Visually impaired people who use such screen readers have to rely on image ALT texts and by using image ALT attributes you allow these people to be your users too

To place an ALT tag simply open your HTML Editor Software and look for the <img src=” “> tag.

Example: <img src=”image.jpg” ALT=”This is an image of my dog”>

So you see we have simply named the image so the spider knows that the big blob of black taking up space on your site is “…an image of my dog”.