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July 2002

Search Engine Tips
Keyword Placement Part III
Graphics

Use Graphic Labels for Keywords

Another place you could put keywords, which many people and web designers don’t know about, is in the alternative description of graphics. This is also called the “alt description” for short. Sometimes you see little descriptions come up when you run your mouse over a graphic. It might say “JPEG 2000 bytes.” You can use that area to enter keywords, which is perfectly acceptable to the search engine. You can take every graphic on your page and instead of it having a worthless “JPEG” label, or something that does not mean much to most people, you can use keywords.

This is a place where you can increase the number of keywords on your page without putting them in the visible text area. If you do this, don’t put your keyword a hundred times in a row. That is spamming and you will be kicked out of many search engines when they catch you.

Naming Graphics with Keywords

Search engines are getting so sophisticated now that you want to take advantage of any little boost you can get to beat the system. You can also name your graphics with keywords. Instead of making the file name of a photo “joe.gif” you would name it “presentation_skills.gif” or public_speaking.jpg. Anything you can do to boost yourself without spamming is a good idea.

Here's an example of what the HTML might look like if we named my headshot graphic presentation_skills.jpg and added the keyword phrase "presentation skills" to the alt description.

presentation skills Tom Antion

<img border="0" src="presentation_skills.JPG" alt="presentation skills Tom Antion" width="144" height="192"></p>
<p align="left">

src= means the source of the photo or to boil it down, the name of the photo is presentation_skills.jpg

alt= is the alternative description. I used "presentation skills Tom Antion"

I put the Tom Antion in there in case the search engines start hassling people in the future about the descriptions not matching the photo. That way I don't have to go back and change it.

As you look at my various sites you may see graphics that don't take advantage of the alt description and name of the graphic. This means one of two things. 1. I didn't care about search positioning on that page very much or 2. I had enough keywords on the page and I didn't want to overdo it.

If you are using Microsoft front page, you don't have to know any HTML stuff. Simply change the name of the photo in your folder list and then right click on the photo. Choose "picture properties" then choose the "general" tab, then look for the alt or alternative description text. Put your keywords there, click OK and you've added the words.

Go over your entire website and see where you can add keywords to your graphics.

Send me your suggestions for future Search Engine related articles for this section. mailto:tom@antion.com  

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