Website Search Engine Optimisation - Using The Keyword & Alt Image Tags A Beginners Guide by Brian Cotsen

You may be wondering about the other tags that are found in the source code and used in the body copy of web pages.

There are many different tags that can be used but two that we will look at now have or have had an influence on the search engine optimisation of websites both in the past and now.

These two tags are the 'Keyword' tag and the image 'Alt' tag.

These two tags are often misunderstood and misused in the building and maintaining of well SEO websites.

 

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What is the Keyword Tag.

Lets take a look again at this web page's coding.

Click on the 'View' tab on your search engines top bar.

If you use Internet Explorer 7 you will be able to view the source code of the page, click the 'Page' tab as seen in the image as it appears below:

Then click 'View Source' from the drop down list.

If you use Firefox then you will find the 'View' tab will allow you to see the source code.

Click the 'View' tab.

Then you will see a drop down list that offers several options.

Click the 'Page Source' option.

Whichever you use you will find that a new screen opens revealing the source code of the page.

This source code is like the DNA of the web page. It is the source code that allows the page to be seen as it is, when viewed normally on the internet.

Looking closely to the top of the page you will see the following.

You will notice that the highlighted area start with.

<meta name="Keyword" content="

And ends with

"> (Which you can't see in the above screen capture due to the length of the line)

These 2 surround what will become the 'Keyword Tag' of the web page.

Any words found between these 2 will be the 'Keywords' of the web page.

What should you put into the Keyword Tag?

NOTE:

The keyword tag has very little importance in today's search engine optimisation of websites.

You may find this hard to believe given the importance that I have stressed that 'Keywords', 'Key phrases' & 'Search Terms' have.

So Why is it there?

In the early days of the internet & the beginning of search engines, there needed to be a way of telling the search engines 'what' a website was all about.

The 'Keyword Tag' was created to do this important job, so that search engines could quickly learn what the web page was about and return relevant results to the internet search query.

Unfortunately unscrupulous website developers realised that they could stuff this 'Keyword Tag' full of popular search terms 'Sex', 'Money', Cars' and fool the websites to return their websites in the search results.

Today search engines use the 'Title Tag', 'Description Tag', 'Header Tag', evaluation of the content and incoming links to determine the content and value of the web page and what actual keywords & key phrases they should attach to the web page.

The 'Keyword Tag' is pretty much ignored by all of the major search engines, although smaller search engines may still use the information in it.

So should you bother entering details into it at all?

Yes.

It may have no bearing on your websites SEO at present but it could well be used as a tag in the future.... how boring would it be to have to go through your website and populate every pages 'Keyword Tag' retrospectively?

Besides I find that by typing in the 5 or so keywords it focuses my attention on whether I am actually using those words in the Title, Description, Heading and body of the web page.

My comment here would be not to spend too much time 'populating' this tag.

The Image 'Alt' Tag

A much more important tag to focus on when optimising your website for the search engines is the Image Alt Tag.

This tag is one found in the body of the content on your website.

It's purpose is to give an html text name to any image found on the website.

If you hover over the image to the left, if you are using IE browser, you will see that the words 'Brian Cotsen - Simple Website Marketing' appear as you hover over the image.

This is because when this web page was built, information was typed into the Image Alt Tag.

Some browsers do not display this information such as Firefox.

Why is it important to enter information in the Image Alt Tag?

You may ask yourself why bother to enter information into this tag?

I can see that it's a 'Picture'

There are several good reasons.

• Accessibility - Anyone who is partially or fully blind can use the internet and have text information 'spoken' to them by a computer generated voice. However when the software encounters an image it is unable to tell the website visitor what it is. The Image 'Alt' tag enables the software to tell the user what is on the page.
• There are occasions when web users 'switch off' the images when they are surfing the internet. This could be because they are using a slow internet connection and viewing images would make using the internet too slow. When internet users are viewing in this 'image off' setting they can tell when they might have seen an image and why there is a space on the web page.
• Although the effect may be small, using the image 'alt' tag allows you to put more words on the web page. If your page is all about fly fishing and your keywords are fly fishing then, if your image is of someone 'fly fishing' you can legitimately use your keywords yet again. The effect may be small but every little helps in SEO. On a page with lots of text the effect may be negligible but say you have a page with lots of pictures of fly fishing products you are selling... those image 'Alt' tags could be put to good use.

Word of caution:

Never, never stuff keywords 'illegitimately' into the 'Alt' tag.

Next lets take a look at the 'Heading Tags' and Search Engine Optimisation.

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