The power of Image Links
Images are a powerful way to attract the attention
of website visitors. It has become a natural habit for people to
click on an image, especially those who are not completely internet
savvy. In fact, an active response is a natural
response to any stimuli in nature: Image links are
no exception!
However, this poses an interesting challenge when
considering how search engine spiders interpret image links. Since
search engine spiders cannot "read" or in any way interpret
the message that is being conveyed to visitors by an image, the
only tool a website
architect
has to communicate the image contents is known as the alt
text tag.
The alternate text tag was initially developed in
html to provide an image description for those people, or browsers,
incapable of viewing images. The "alt text" was designed
to display in place of the image. With all modern browsers, the
alt text associated with any image
is visible
if a visitor hovers the mouse over the picture.
In the search engine optimization world, the alt
text tag was quickly targeted as a way to stuff keywords into the
content of a page without changing a web page's appearance. Hence,
the alt text tag was often abused by savvy SEO's stuffing
dozens to hundreds of key words in
the alt
text tag
in
an attempt
to leverage
search
engine ranking results. This posed a serious problem for the search
engines, as well as the visually handicapped visitors relying on
special software to interpret the page content. Consequently, the
major search engines began filtering these tags out; in other
words,
ignoring
them.
Although the way the search engines handle any website
code can change at any time, today the text in alt text tags are
largely disqualified for ranking purposes. However, the
alt text associated with an image link is currently still considered
for search engine ranking purposes.
The text contained in any image link alt text tag
should be developed very carefully. The text should be pertinent
to the image content and message ( especially for the handicapped
), AND be pertinent to the page one is linking into. One may even
want to pay careful attention to the actual file name of the image
itself, to ensure organic website content.
Image Links with Text
A more popular and perhaps wiser
strategy is to incorporate both an image link and an accompanying
text
link. The only drawback
to this method is that it effects the presentation of the page
and image. Small asthetic changes can be made to minimize the
impact of the text to serve many different purposes, including
useability and correct website architecture for search engine
optimization. Balancing asthetics with search engine targeting
website architecture is a matter of preference and priorities which
each website owner will have to determine on a case by case basis.
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