Thursday, February 14, 2008

Improve Craft Site Traffic With Alt Text

stampin up card stem silhouettes
Alt tags or alternative text for images is a great way to improve your craft website or blog traffic. Many people do image searches and crafting in particular lends itself to this type of traffic.

While search engines can recognize that there is an image, they cannot determine what the image is. So images themselves do not count as content on your site. By providing alternative text you are letting the search engine know what the image is.

When viewers use a search engine to seek pictures of some topic, your images may come up in the search results if you have included alt tags for your pictures. You can use site relevant key words that relate to your image as your alternative text.

To add alternative text to your craft images you need to edit the html and place alt="sample text here" within the image tag. So your image tags would look something like this:


Alternative Text

This is the html code for the card you see above. The highlighted portion is the alt text. If you add alternative text to your craft pictures, it is likely you will see people finding your site through image searches.

I have to confess I am quite lazy about doing this myself, but I am going to make more of an effort to do it consistently in the future.

The card you see above is one I made when I was at my sister's house last week. I used some of her Stampin' Up Wild Wasabi paper and a stamp from the Stem Silhouettes set. I also used the word window punch.

No comments: