OK children. In today’s SEO 101 lesson, we will be taking a look at the alt attribute for image tags.

Over at the Official Google Webmaster Blog, there’s a nice video post on Using ALT attributes smartly. It’s hard to see, so I’ll type in the HTML he is using.

The first one is

<img src=”dsc004542.jpg”>
<img means that this is an image and src=”dsc004542.jp”> is the name of the file that we are calling. This is what will show up on the website.

In the second one, he shows the alt attribute (it’s actually an attribute, but he calls it a tag. This is really normal among us, but incorrect just the same). So, it would look like this:

<img scr=”dsc004542.jpg” alt=”Matt’s cat Emmy Cutts with some yarn”>

The addition of alt=”Matt’s cat Emmy Cutts with some yarn” is the part that describes the image to Google, and has an impact on it’s appearance in Google Images. He touched also on naming the file a better one, and that will help as well. So, we would have something like:

<img src=”cat-with-yarn.jpg” alt=” Matt’s cat Emmy Cutts with some yarn”>

That’s all for today kiddies. Have a great weekend.