What is a ALT tag?

Yahoo Slurp, Googlebot, MSNbot, etc. are automated programs send out by search engines to catalog and index your site. As they are basically computer programs, you can guess that they love text & code. They will not grade you on your lovely images as they really can’t see them. So what to do?

Easy, add some code to describe your image so that the ‘bot’ or ‘spider’ can easily catalog the image. Enter the ALT tag.

A quick example of an image with an ALT tag:

	This is a tree. You know that because you can see it. The ‘bots’ will pick this up partly because I have correctly named the file – ‘tree.jpg’, but in order to help out a little more I am going to add an ALT tag.
Tree	This is the same image with an ALT tag and description

And the code for this is:

ALT Tag Code

alt=”tree” being the part of the code needed for the search engines to ‘see’ this image.

Before you go overboard adding ALT tags to every single image, have a plan. Don’t use the same tags for everything, you have 255 characters to play with, and no need to label spacer.gifs

H1 tags

If you wrote this HTML Code on your page:

H Tags

you would see the following:

This is heading 1

This is heading 2

This is heading 3

This is heading 4

This is heading 5

This is heading 6

H1 tags are one of the most important part of SEO which is the header tag situated in body of a website. It can be termed as the most simple form of header found on a web page. Through h1 tags search engines come to know about the site content details. If its used in proper co-ordination with anchor text and title tag then you can even expect increased density of website traffic from major search engines like Yahoo, Bing and Google.

Although the feature of h1 tags is not new and has present for many years, only in the last few years has its significance grown due to increased demand by Google. It carries much more importance than keyword meta tag and description meta tag. The best position to place these H1 tags is at the header situated above the content.

h2 tags can be used for subtitles, and carry less importance than h1. Only 1 h1 tag should appear on a site.

I Love Google

At one time or another, you may have manually submitted your website to search engines without success, and wondered why your websitewasn’t being indexed. And perhaps you even used a submission service, all to no avail. You are not alone. Many websites are also unable to be indexed. Fortunately, there are ways to correct your problem.

Below are some common factors which might delay or even prevent your site from being indexed by search engines, as well as suggestions on how to fix the problems.

Time Elapsed Since Submission

Patience Grasshopper. While we hear of services that promise to get a website indexed within 24 hours, the typical time for a website to get indexed is 1-8 weeks. If you need to get indexed more quickly, some search engines offer paid submission options. Maybe add an RSS feed, the Search Engines index those quite rapidly.

Already Indexed

You may be already indexed. Before fretting about being unable to find your website in a search engine, refer to that search engine’s documentation on the method to find a particular website. Additionally, beware of submitting your website to often. With some search engines,duplicate or excessive submissions can hurt ranking.

Reachable From Homepage

Search engines have been known to drop certain pages from their indexes that cannot be reached from the home page. For this reason, many websites include site maps (XML or HTML Format). However, if your site is small, a good navigation should suffice. (Note: Search engines generally index pages that are reachable within 1 to 2 links from the home page.)

Inbound Links

Many search engines refuse to index websites that do not have any links pointing to them from other sites. You can easily remedy this situationby submitting your website to directories, soliciting links from other similar sites, and by being active on discussion boards.

Frames

Frames have often been big problems for websites. Frequently, search engines are able to index the main content of the homepage, but not thenavigation, resulting in only one page of the site being indexed.

Free Web Hosting

Some search engines refuse to index or simply limit the number of pages that they will index from website residing on free web hosts. This ismost likely due to the poor quality of sites on these hosts as well as their frequent use by spammers.

To avoid being discriminated against, simply purchase your own domain name and opt for a respectable host. (For a domain name and basic hosting, you can expect to pay $90 – $150 per year, a small price to pay for a search-engine-friendly website.) If you can register your domain for more than 1 year, a good sign of stability.

Unfriendly Dynamic URLs

If your website is dynamic, many of your urls might contain question marks (?) and ampersands (&). Unfortunately, many search engines ignore these urls. As a result, if you want these pages to be indexed, you will need to create search engine friendly urls (most likely with.htaccess files) or generate static versions of each dynamic page.

JavaScript, AJAX, and Flash

Some content is non-indexable by search engines. This includes, but is not limited to JavaScript, AJAX, Flash, Java applets, audio or videofiles, or text included in images. Be sure that there is actual rich text content on your website or it may be ignored by search engines. This may change in the future, but for today, HTML files are the easiest to index.

Slow Loading Pages and Unreliable Web Hosts

Web pages that take a long time to load may negatively affect your site being indexed. For example, a web page might timeout before a searchengine can index the content. To avoid this problem, keep your pages small. Minimize whitespace, optimize images.

Similarly, a web host that is unreliable also makes it impossible for a search engine to have consistent access to your website. This could resultin pages not being indexed, or pages that are already indexed being dropped from their databases.

Search Engine Optimization or Spam?

If your SEO tactics are questionable, a search engine may penalize you for spamming. So be careful when optimizing your pages and do not excessively repeat keywords or use special techniques to serve different content to search engines and other content to visitors.