The Alt Tag: Improving The Relevancy Of Your Web Images

In the web accessibility, images need an alternative text - called the alt tag - assigned to them. This is because search engines cannot read images, but they can read the “alt” tag that is assigned to them. Internet browsers like Internet Explorer will display the alt tag when the cursor moves over the image.

The alt tag provides a textual description for images, for both humans and search engine spiders. Using the alt tag in conjunction with your keywords will improve your web site's usability and will also help with the rankings in the search engines. Search engine optimizers should not forget to use the alt attribute, if they are trying to optimise the websites for the search engines. The HTML code used to create the alt tag is:
img src="image.gif" alt="short description of image is written here"
The image tag allows to display information about images, no matter the format of the image:as .gif, .jpg, .png and more. The alt tag is intended to provide alternative information about an element and is generally required for image and image maps.

Some guidelines before using the alt tag are:

• if the image contains important information then one must use alt tag to describe the image

• alt tag should be used when the image is serving as a hyper link to a particular page

Benefits of alt tag:

• increases your page keyword density score
• it improves relevancy for targeted keywords
• images will be optimized for Google’s or Yahoo’s image search, only if the keywords are placed inside alt tags.
• helpful for defining images along with local content in the search engine itself.

Importantly, if you want your website to be ranked higher for the targeted keywords use the alt tag, as it will make sure that important sections – images - of your pages are not missed out. Search engine crawlers also use alt tags to decode image description i.e. what an image is or what it is representing.