The ALT tag

Something that absolutely amazes me in this day and age is when I see an image on a web page that doesn't use an ALT tag. Alt stands for 'alternate' and it's used to describe an image - for people who are visually impaired, intentionally have images turned off on their browser, etc. It has several other very important reasons that you need to use it for every single image on your website.

As you will see over and over, there are things that should be done for human beings that will read your web sites, and things that should be done for search engines such as Google and Yahoo -- normally, in a well-made site, it will be the same thing. The ALT tag is a good example of this.

For human beings, using a modern web browser, when their most rests on the image, the content of your ALT tag will display. Don't forget that computers (including the ones used by Google, etc.) can't recognize your image -- they're depending on you to describe the content to them -- via the ALT tag.

Some people think that the ALT tag is a good way of cramming keywords onto a page to 'fool' the search engines -- they're wrong. Google, Yahoo, etc. are relatively advanced, and will notice this, and penalize you -- just like they should. Use the ALT tag, not as a way to 'cheat' but as a way to describe (to people and search engines) what this particular image is about.