SEO Starter Series: Tagging

So you’re probably thinking that getting into the world of SEO is going to be a difficult one, or you’re just already a long for the ride but aren’t doing a few standard things to set yourself up better down the road. We’ve all been there, and there’s this misconception that a lot of people believe that SEO is an easy thing to master. The good thing about SEO is that it really is pretty easy, but it’s also an easy thing that many people screw up. So this series is going to hook you up with some general things that should be done to help set yourself up in the future so that the SEO goodness comes back full circle.

Be sure to tag everything…

I really mean that. Meta description tags help the search engines read what’s going to be on the page(it’s what they use to describe the searched page in Google searches). The Meta keywords section used to have a select importance, but now? Not so much. Google doesn’t even use it anymore. That being said, while Google is the end all be all site of searches. I would and will still do it until ALL search engines out there stop using it completely. There’s just no point to limit your potential to be seen because Google refuses to use meta keywords.

ALT tags are still one of the largest factors in searching and indexing for Google. This excerpt is straight from their webmaster guidelines:

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

If you view the source code of my site, you’ll see that most if not all of my images are alt tagged(the ones I deemed important anyways). It’s a process that I’m still working on to this day. This version of my site is new, but there’s always going to be things changing on it, and forgetting/neglecting to place ALT tags on all the images can and really does hurt me. So it’s a process that you’re just going to want to keep up with. It’s another one of those, easy thing to do, easy thing to screw up process. What should be in your ALT tags? W3.org has a pretty good explanation of how you should fill and or describe things in your alt tags:

1) Nowadays, Web browsers are available in a very wide variety of platforms with very different capacities; some cannot display images at all or only a restricted set of type of images; some can be configured to not load images. If your code has the alt attribute set in its images, most of these browsers will display the description you gave instead of the images.

2) Some of your visitors cannot see images, be they blind, color-blind, low-sighted; the alt attribute is of great help for those people that can rely on it to have a good idea of what’s on your page.

3) Search engine bots belong to the two above categories: if you want your website to be indexed as well as it deserves, use the alt attribute to make sure that they won’t miss important sections of your pages.

So there you have it. A pretty in depth guide on why you should use the Meta-tag sections and why you need to ALT tag everything you possibly can. Check back later this week to see the second post in the SEO Starter Series.