1 Quick & Effective Way to Improve Your SEO

Don't Ignore Your Alt Tags for SEO

Staying up-to-date with the process of search engine optimization is tough. The moment that you feel like you have mastered a particular technique, Google comes in with an update and makes your time investment all-but wasted. This is why people in the search profession need to stay agile. This includes being up to date with the changes that are occurring in the industry. If you can capitalize on a reliable white hat technique (ethical/non-manipulative) before many others are doing it, you can gain a sustainable advantage. This is where the alt tags come in. Having a proper strategy in place for these nifty little tags could improve your search rankings substantially.

What Is An "Alt Tag?"

The first thing that you need to know about alt tags is that they are used in images. You may understand the concept of SEO in the text of the webpage, but did you know that you can do something similar to the photos that are on the webpage? This is where alt tags are introduced. When referencing these alt tags, there are two portions of them that you should be concerned with; they are the alt tag itself and the accompanying title attribute of the tag. The alt tags are most important for screen readers and visually impaired people. These tags tell website visitors what is contained in those images. The title attribute is mainly used as a tooltip when you hover over the image.

Why Is the Alt Tag Important?

Images (and video) are a dominating force in the search industry. One of the big selling points for hotels is the imagery that is presented to the consumer online. People like to feel like they can experience staying at your hotel before they stay there. If you have set up proper alt tags for images, then they will show up on the user's end if they are looking for visuals of your property. If there are no alt tags, then there is 0 chance that you can control what your customers will see about your property. No alt tags is a huge mistake you can't afford to make, but the presentation is just one aspect that this can help your hotel with.

Another reason to have alt tags is that they help mitigate image issues on your website. Let's say that for some reason, an image does not load properly on the user's computer. If there are no alt tags, then they will only see a small image of a broken picture. The user won't know what is meant to be there. This makes for bad user experience, and search engines frown upon that.

Conversely, if you have alt tags on there, then the customer will see the text of what is meant to be there. This means that there is a better chance that they will stick around a while longer.

Improving Your Company's SEO

If you are looking for a place where you can get some quick wins, then you want to look at your alt tags. I suggest first familiarizing yourself with Google's Publishing Guidelines. This resource will provide you with everything that you would want to know regarding best practices. You don't want to stuff keywords or create SPAM, but you want to make sure that they are at least present on the page. Remember that the most important thing to accomplish is to improve the user experience. Make sure that the images that you use are high quality and, most importantly, that they are relevant to the image and the rest of the content. If you'd instead leave it to the experts, feel free to contact E-Marketing Associates.