Blogspot On-page SEO Part 3: It's Rude Not To Invite ALT Tags To The Party!

Aim: How to implement ALT image tags in your Blogspot blog to increase on-page SEO

Optimising images is becoming more and more important in on-page SEO efforts.  It's sometimes not enough to rely on just your written content to implement the optimisation. Introducing ALT image tags to your existing images is a two second fix and can really help boost your Blogspot SEO and ranking in the search engines. Google loves ALT image tags... In Google's webmaster guidelines, they advise the use of alternative (ALT) text for all the images found on your Blogspot blogs and websites.

"Use the alt attribute to provide descriptive text. In addition, we recommend using a human-readable caption and descriptive text around the image."

When a search engine robot crawls a particular blog page, it reads everything found within the source code of that page (titles, body text, meta tags, attribute tags, alt tags and so on) and makes an informed decision on what that particular page is about. It can detect that an image is present (due to the image HTML tag in the blog page source code), but is unable to recognise whats being displayed in that image. This is where ALT image tags come in to play!

As I've mentioned, Google really wants all of us to use ALT image tags, they wouldn't mention it otherwise. Not only are ALT image tags good for increasing the keyword density of your content (when used correctly), but also the accessibility of your content to other users. In recent Google algorithm changes, they have put more emphasis on user statistics (how long a person stays on your blog for, do they revisit, do they share the content with others via social media and email), accessibility and quality of content. By using these stats, Google and other search engines have been able to make judgment values of the usefulness of a blog or website and where they  deserve to be ranked. 

My opinion on ALT image tags... I think Google and other search engines don't assign the same SEO weight to the ALT image tags like they once did. Like with the META keyword tag (can find more information here), the system was abused by many website creators spamming their keyword for an increase in ranking. Still, I find a considerable amount of my traffic coming from highly optimised images, thanks to the ALT tag.
Where I think ALT image tags really shine is the improvement in accessibility and meeting of the web standards, which I believe is something Google definitely looks at when deciding the quality of a blog or website.

So how do you implement ALT image tags into your Blogspot articles, it's as simple as this:

1) Click on the Edit HTML tab in your post options.

2) Scroll down the HTML code until you find your image. If your struggling to find it within the code, press CTRL-F and search for the exact file name of the image.

3) Here is the extra bit of code you will need:

<img href="your image URL here" alt="information about the image here"> 

You might already have an image tag setup(after uploading an image to your Blogspot article) which means you will only need to add alt="information about the image here" part at the end.

4) Save your changes. You have now successfully added ALT image tag to your image. Apply this to all images on your blog to improve on-page Blogspot SEO!

Image Optimisation Tips

• Choose a logical file name that reinforces your keyword or Blogspot name. For example, in my particular case on this blog I could use something like... blogspotseo-stickman.jpg as a file name for an image.

• Make sure the image is relevant to adjacent content.

• Do not spam your keyword or have repeated ALT image tags. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing consider this spam and could penalise or decrease your blog rank.

• Be brief and clear in the ALT description. For example, if I had a picture of a red ball I could have the ALT description as 'a red ball' or even 'a ball'. I have seen some ALT descriptions bearing too much information such as 'a red ball that I purchased from the shop down the road with my aunt'. The search engines will only disregard most of that information anyways.

• Be conscious about what the search engines want. They don't particularly mind seeing a keyword in the ALT image tag if it has some relevance. By implementing clear and concise ALT descriptions, you are essentially complimenting and enhancing the rest of your content (and keywords) on that page also.

Has this topic helped you? Have you any advice for people adding ALT image tags to their Blogspot blog? 


Edit (22/03/2012): Blogger have released an update that lets you add ALT and TITLE image tags without the need to go into the HTML code. To find more information on this subject, click here. 

If you found this article helpful or interesting, why not show it to a friend?