Web Traffic 411

Essential Element 2: On Page Elements, Part II

In the last post I covered the On Page Elements that the site visitor will actually see: file name, title, headlines, formatting, and content. This post covers Meta Tags and Alt Attributes: On Page Elements that they won’t see.

(Even though that may seem counterintuitive, they’re called On Page because you control them on each individual page of your site.)

Meta Tags: These are bits of code that “tag” certain information with significance. They used to be the driving force behind SEO. Before search engines got all sophisticated and stuff (pre-Google days), they’d rely on information provided by the webmasters themselves. The site designers put keywords and descriptions into meta tags: code that the user would never see. But, nefarious elements will always find a way to cause problems. More and more started putting strings of unrelated keywords and description into their tags, rendering them almost useless.

With that caveat in mind, it is still a good idea to use these behind-the-scene helpers. Google says they don’t use the description tag at, but I once did a File..Save As and forgot to change the meta description from the original page, and the original description showed up on Google results! Just to be safe it’s best to optimize them.

Alt Attributes: Search engines can only read text and not image files, so the Alt Attribute is how you describe any images on the page. Within the img src tag, include alt=”describe the photo here”. Don’t be tempted to stuff it with keywords. Instead, make sure the image is appropriate for the page and use keywords that describe it accurately, then follow it with the word “image”. Note: These are often called Alt Tags, but that’s a misnomer.

Next we’ll get into the fun stuff: Off Page Elements. (Really. There are times I think “This is work?)

Theresa