How to use Alt Tags and Image Links

This page describes how to use alt tags to provide text alternatives to images. 

Alt Tags provide alternative text for graphics on your web page. Some users may have graphics turned off on their web page and alt text gives them an alternative way of knowing what is going on. Also, text based browsers, such as Lynx, do not show graphics. Finally, the alt tags can provide details to blind people with audio browsers.

Here is the famous Google image that returns you to the google home page if you click on it. Try looking at the Google site using Lynx to see how to use alt tags the Google way.

Here is the expression behind the famous google image:

<a href="http://www.google.com"><img alt="Return to Google homepage." src="google_sm.gif"</a>

If you do a search for "Return to google home page" you will find pages which contain this image. Most of these pages do not have "Return to Google homepage." in the body text, so this shows that Alt tags are important in SEO. 

This above expression is optimised for the keyword Google in three places: the href hyperlink reference, alt text, and the image file name. Do the same with your images to maximise SEO.