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Judicious Use of the ALT Tag for Usability and SEO
By - Tom P Ryan
Despite what all the search engine companies like to say, the
technology behind image searching is very much in its infancy and it will be a
long while yet before any algorithms - or computers for that matter - will be
able to successfully recognize and image based on its content.
Quite simply, our human minds are hard-wired - from a very
early age - to recognize and evaluate visual imagery. A three year old may not
be able to tell you how a car's engine works, but they will be able to tell you
the difference between a cow and a car.
For computers, it's not so easy. While search engine are
slowly building their abilities to analyze textual content, they have a long way
to go with images, and don't expect a solution soon. Even Google - the mighty
king of online search - still uses human editors to successfully tag the
important aspects of any online images.
For SEO practitioners, it's critical to remember this. Search
engines simply don't - and can't - recognize just what that image is you're
putting up on that website. Thankfully, HTML has always provided a good meta
attribute to help the search engines out. It's called the ALT tag (which means
alternative). It's purpose was originally singular: to help out vision impaired
users and those who surfed the web with image loading turned off. Yes, people
actually chose to do that back in the early days of dial up internet access, it
made browsing so much quicker (note: this has never applied to those users
browsing for, um, cough, adult content).
By effectively using the ALT tag, you are not only helping
out those who may be vision impaired, but also helping to give search engines a
helping hand. But don't get greedy. Nothing tells a search engine you're up to
no good by stuffing your ALT tags with excessive keywords, or worse still,
keywords which have no relation whatsoever to the image's content. As image
recognition is still a far away technology, search engines still rely very
heavily on humans for the grunt work, and while it may be possible to fool a
blind search engine bot, a human will quickly recognize that picture of a
toaster is indeed not related to Britney Spears.
Good search engine optimization is not just about textual
content (although it still primarily is). It's also about making sure all your
elements, from the code base, to the structure, to any other content, such as
image, is tagged and categorized. Therefore the ALT tag is just another tool you
can use in your optimization strategy.
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About The Author:
Tom Ryan works for Xivos online, a Melbourne, Australia, based SEO & SEM company. As well as being into search engine marketing, he's also pretty big on usability and web standards.
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