Would you consider your Web site to be visually appealing to your visitor? Is it heavy in graphics, photos and colorful displays that catch the eyes of your customer and make them want to proceed on and click through to other pages? For SEO having a dazzling Web site that features all the bells and whistles can be a great tool to keep visitors there and possibly returning, but this could cause a problem with how they get to your site from search engines.

Search engine spiders are blind when it comes to images and graphics - they can only see text. When a spider crawls your site, it's indexing it based upon the pages' text and not the hi-def photos that give it the visual appeal. This is why SEO gurus say "content is king." A page that has little to no text, but stunning images that may be relevant to a search, is not going to seen by the robots, which means it wont be seen in the search results.

It's not to say that images are bad. They can actually be made to work to your advantage. The simplest way to enhance your site's search visibility with images is to add an Alt IMG Tag. The Alt IMG Tag is placed within the HTML code as a description for an image or graphic. This is the text that appears when you run your mouse over a photo.

Much the same for search engine robots, Alt IMG attributes identify and describe images for the visually impaired through text-to-voice software. By not using Alt IMG attributes you could be missing out on making conversions with qualified customers because the pages are not completely described and seem to be irrelevant to their search.

Search engines index Alt IMG Tags. So they can contribute to the relevancy of a page by providing search engine spiders with additional information. But don't spam Alt Tags by stuffing them with keywords. Accurately and naturally describe the image using relevant keywords. Keep this in mind the next time you're reviewing or designing your Web site.

Labels: Organic SEO