WebTrafficWire.com

Today’s Traffic Tip: the importance of properly naming the images on your website as well as the attributes associated with those images: the alt and the title attributes tags.

Most websites have a header. Example, Country Music Land. Move the cursor over this header, and “country music videos” pops up automatically.

This is how this is done:

Within the html for this website shown, refer to the country music land header image and its source.

Tip One: Rather than calling this “header1” like on most websites, use a pair of keywords. Here country-music is used, since this site is about country music and country music videos. It’s best to use a hyphen or underscore to separate the words.

Tip Two: All images should have an alt attribute, which is a replacement for the image if it fails to load. Some browsers cannot load an image, the image may not load on a small mobile device, or for persons with disabilities, it provides them an alternative for the image they cannot see. Since this website is about country music videos, the header alt tag is “country music video.”

Tip Three: Rather than just use the alt tag, add the “title” tag to add the pop-up. The pop up works in some but not all browsers. The “alt” tag and the “title” tag do not need to be exactly the same. The alt is a replacement (country music video), where the title is more descriptive (country music videos). Note that by using “video” and “videos,” two separate keywords are included, since this is one of the first things spiders will see when spidering the site.

Both alt and title tags should be less than 50 characters long.