Improve your Website Through the Pr 0 article

Improve your Website Through the Proper use of

Improve Your Web Site Through
The Proper Use Of Tags, Alt Tags & Attributes In Links
By Richard Zwicky

Improved web design, and search engine performance all in one easy step! Believe it or not, it is possible, easy, and really straightforward.

Improve Your Web Site Through
The Proper Use Of Tags, Alt Tags & Attributes In Links
By Richard Zwicky

Improved web design, and search engine performance all in one easy step! Believe it or not, it is possible, easy, and really straightforward. There are 3 extremely useful tags and attributes that most people overlook, or do not take advantage of properly. Theses are alt tags, title attributes in links and tags.

The reason you want to spend some time focusing on these 3 facets of your web site is simple. Two of them make the web site easier to understand and navigate, for people and the search engines. The third one is much cleaner than the tags, and it works really well for key phrases and terms within the search engines. This article deals with the merits and value of each of these mostly misused, or ignored opportunities.

Alt Tags
The first opportunity is the one that is most often used, and misused: The alt tag. Alt tags are comments that should be used whenever you add a graphic, or image to a web page. Pictures are worth a thousand words to you and me, but zero to a search engine. An alt tag should be a little bit of short, descriptive text which helps any user (and search engine) understand what the reference is pointing to. If you are not aware of what an alt tag looks like, here's an example:

The code to make this banner appear is as follows.



When you move your mouse over the graphic, words appear. The words tell people what the graphic refers to, what it is about, and where it leads to. Internally, if you had a hardware store, you could use an image of a power tool link to a "tools" section, with the words "Tools & Power Tools" in the alt tag. It may be obvious, but most people don't take advantage of this opportunity. Most people don't even have alt tags attached to their images, or have alt tags that look like this - alt="" - not much good, they're blank. That's all the search engines, and some old web browsers will see - blank space.

Alt tags also afford you an opportunity to give the search engines more meaningful content to work with. If you have a graphics rich web site, there's very little to no text for the search engine spiders to use to analyze your site. If you attach a relevant alt tag to each image however, the search engines will read them as your textual content, and your web site will show up in relevant searches. Even if your website is content rich, the alt tags allow you to reinforce what is highly important, the key terms, within the content. Here's the key - use relevant terms. Don't just put "About Us" Use descriptive key terms, such as "About Acme Power Tools".

Tags
Next, we have the tags. Often, when web designers are building pages they use tags, and to emphasize the page heading, and subheadings for each section. Whenever you get the chance, use tags instead. There are 5 different tags. The largest two - &

should be used for the major title on each page, and then the next three -

,

&

for subheadings. The smallest one,

will look just like regular bold text on a page.

So why use them? The single most important reason to use these, aside from consistency of output, is for the search engines. The search engines weight different text within a page differently. We have found that terms used in tags are weighted heavier than regular text. This doesn't happen with using a attribute. The larger the text is (1 being largest, and 5 smallest size), the more weighty or important the key terms in the heading are viewed as being with respect to the overall document. Use the terms in these tags judiciously. Especially in the larger sizes. The search engines give these tags weight, because logically, the header for a page, and for each section of a page conveys the concept of what the entire document's focus is oriented towards. For this reason be very sure that you only use terms which you intend the web page to be found by.

Title Attribute
Different from a