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<img src=”image.jpg” alt=”alt attribute content”>
Images are practically invisible to search engines. A machine can not look at an image and tell what’s in the image. Therefore search engines have to figure out in another way what’s in an image. There are a couple of clues in a web page that indicate what’s in the image.
First and most obvious of course is the name of the file. For example: “house-on-hill.jpg” probably is a picture of a house on a hill. So that’s a big help for search engines. But not always the names of image files are that obvious.
Another indicator for a search engine is the words close to the image. The logic used here is that the text close to the image is likely to say something about the image.
Then there is the alt attribute. This attribute, like shown at the top of this page, simply gives you the possibility to write a short description of what’s in the image. Besides the obvious advantage for search engines, there is the added value that this attribute is intentionally used. In other words, unless you put it there, it won’t show up. And that means its content is more likely to be a description of the image content.
When you’re a webmaster, the first thing that comes to mind is: “Which images need alt attributes?”
That’s a very good question because images like a nice round corner that’s part of your design, doesn’t require an alt attribute. Only those images that are related to the content of a page require an alt attribute. So that’s the rule, use a short description of the content of the image in the alt attribute, and only in those images that are part of the content of the page.
That means that images you use as part of the design of the website don’t require an alt attribute, except for some specific cases. For example, if you use menu buttons, the button image is a link. In this case you can use the alt attribute as the text of the link.
The logo of your company, usually at the top left of your design, should be a link to your home page. In this case you can also use an alt attribute with the most important keyword of your site.
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