• Lesson Index:
• Overview
• Basic
• Google Toolbar and PR
• Alt and Title
• Funny Names
• Google Dance
• Googlebot
• Google Sandbox
• Trust Rank
• AdSense
• Google Ads
• Google Search
• AdSense for Content
• Earning Reports
• Channels
• Policies
• Filter Ads
• Promotion
• Keyword Optimization
• Information Rich Pages
• Link Exchanges
• No Tricks
• No Spam
• Web Forums
• Web Directories
• Other Ways
• Checking Up

Alt and Title Attributes

In this lesson, you will learn some good habits for better search engine results and better accessibility for vision impaired users. These are good web practices in general. If you make your website accessibility friendly, it will inherently make it search engine friendly as well. Afterall, Google is the utimate vision-impaired user.

Google can not see the visuals of graphics. Therefore we must find a way to associate text with images and links. And that is through the use of alt and title attributes, which is what these attributes were designed for. It is known that search engines definitely looks at these attributes.

We have seen how to use the alt and title attributes in our other course. But for this lesson, we will take the website iGliss.com as an example.

In this case the tagline "Get your own high quality RSS feeds..." and icons text are constructed as graphics in order to get the exact look-and-feel desired and to have it looks consistent across all browsers and platforms. See here for a discussion between the tradeoff of using live text versus graphics.

In order for Google to pull this page high in the search results, it will need to find ample and relevant text on your page. So we add text to the page by supplying alt attributes to the <img> tag and title attribute to the <a> tag as shown...

<a href="Browse.html" title="Find RSS feeds"><img alt="Find RSS Feeds" title="Find RSS Feeds" src="images/find.gif" border="0" name="find" ></a>

In general, you should always have alt attribute for all non-decorative images. While you are at it, mind as well add the title attribute also. The alt attribute causes Internet Explorer to pop up the yellow tooltip when your cursor pauses over the image. Firefox uses the title attribute of instead. For anchor tags, use the title attribute whenever appropriate.

How does search engines use these attributes? Because Googlebot sees the words "find rss feeds" in this page, it will start associating the keyword phrase "find rss feeds" with this page. So when a user types in "find rss feeds" in a Google search, Google will bring up this page as part of its result. The more instances of the keyword phrase it sees on the page, the greater the association. But don't overdo it, otherwise Google will give you a penalty for "keyword spamming". There is a percentage range for this "keyword density" that SEO engineers consider optimal.

Not only that, but if other people link to you using this keyword phrase in their links as in ...

<a href="http://igliss.com">Find RSS Feeds</a>

That will further enhances the association of the keyword phrase "find rss feeds" with the URL http://igliss.com

It is not recommended that you use tricky techniques (such as text color and background color being the same, CSS tricks, etc) to inject text into your page. Googlebot may see through your scheme and give you a spam penalty. Don't under estimate the intelligences of the Googlebot.

Next

In the next lesson, you will learn a little more about Google's index update cycle.