Free SEO Tricks: Using Image Alt Tags

If you are a mom blogger you are probably visiting my site to find out how to drive traffic to your site. You want your blog to rank high on all of the all major SERPs (search engine results pages) for the major search terms important to your blog. To achieve this goal it is important that you understand various search engine optimization tricks that can insure that your mom blog can compete for the top ten listings for the same search terms that other mom bloggers are going after.

Why pay for SEO tricks when you have many basic tricks you can do for free? Many of the things I teach you have been around for quite awhile but we just don't take advantage of them. We rely on programs, plug-ins or paying an SEO company to do it for us.

Using alt tags on all of the images you add to your blog is a simple and surefire way to do help your mom blog rank in search engine results. I am not saying that it is going to drive a ton of traffic to your site but I have seen this free SEO trick work wonders on my own blogs and it can work for yours too.

I have had brand new blogs rank for keywords on the search engines within days just by using this tip. Using alt tags is something you should be doing on a continual basis everytime you post an image in a post or on your sidebar. Yes, it takes a few extra minutes or your time but it is worth the results it brings

And, once again, it is a free SEO (search engine optimization) trick you can do without paying someone to optimize your site or having to changeover to WordPress to get a SEO plug-in. See, I mainly teach how to optimize Blogger blogs. If you want to learn how to use WordPress then please visit Lorelle's blog.

What is an ALT Tag?

ALT - which stands for alternative - was added to HTML as a way to attach text to a graphic, photo, or other image so that when people who are disabled - mainly those who cannot see and have a text reader read them web pages - would know that what they are "seeing" on the page is supposed to be a graphic. When you leave out the alternative text the reader just ignores the image and moves on. Sometimes that is fine but other times, like in the case of a button that needs to be clicked, it is vital information the person is not being able to see and the text reader move right on past it.

The alt tag is also used as a placeholder if the image is not available.

Search engines don’t comprehend images that you have embedded into a post or on your sidebar but instead the search engine is looking for words. If you don't use alt text tags the images won't be indexed and you will have wasted another opportunity to drive free traffic to your blog.

Test: Hover your mouse over the image below. You should see, Mommy Blogger Guide: Free SEO Tricks using Image Alt Tags, appear. That shows you that the image has alternative text added to the code.

How do you add text to an image?

Step 1: Create a new post.

Step 2: Add an image to your post.

Step 3: Click Edit HTML.

Step 3: Local the image code and look for alt"". Here is the actual HTML for the picture you see to the right.

<img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 125px; height: 125px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtx4x4CIbjaf5NwcGXuEWrkZHwXHwjUh9sRcob3Ty_YkndPSqRsI3kgxzbvY8ne-SkduS-Al6ZWo8rkflwVNqClNCvlYmL-DSaRSWQ5QOuPpt55-AGvX1rSPOMxXxJD27wEkvziUdVrAXq/s400/mommybloggers125x125.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5404181778277690498" border="0" />

Step 4: Click in between the quotes and type the words you want the search engine to index that image for. If it is a button then you should be typing the name of the button.

What should you type in between the image alt tags quotes?

I would suggest using keywords that help drive traffic to that post. If the post is about free SEO tricks I would put that phrase in the quote. You can even use the title of your post. You can always go back and change it if you want at a later date but putting something is better than never putting anything.

I would not suggest stuffing your image alt tag full of keywords because you can definitely overdo it and get your site banned as spam or search engines might just ignore it. Using alt tags is a good way to add targeted keywords to you blog's content and it is a free SEO trick you should do everytime you add an image and not once or twice when you think you want to test it out.

If you implement this simple, yet free, SEO technique, you should see the search engines boost your blog's ranking. By adding text in the image alt tag you are helping the search engine index that image and it will help your blog to come up when someone looks for images using specific keywords.

So to Summarize Image Alt Tags are good for:

• Making your site accessible to the visually impaired
  
• Describes and image so that search engines can index them
  
• Add keywords to your blog posts to help your blog rank better
  

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