Putting Keywords Into Images and Graphics

Another place you could put keywords, which many people and web designers don’t know about, is in the “alternative description” of graphics. This is also called the “alt description” for short. Sometimes you see little descriptions come up when you run your mouse over a graphic.

It might say “JPEG 2000 bytes.” You can use that area to enter keywords, which is perfectly acceptable to the search engine. You can take every graphic on your page and instead of it having a worthless “JPEG” label, or something that does not mean much to most people, you can use keywords.

This is a place where you can increase the number of keywords on your page without putting them in the visible text area. If you do this, don’t put your keyword a hundred times in a row. That is spamming and you will be kicked out of many search engines when they catch you.

You can hide keywords in the alternative description of your graphics.

[NOTE: If you try to get work from the Government, the alt description of graphics must fall within their guidelines for usability for sight-impaired persons.

A site impaired person has software that will read these alt descriptions to tell them what the picture or graphic is, since they can’t see it. It’s not a bad idea to combine keywords with accurate descriptions so that any sight-impaired person can use your site.]

Search engines are getting so sophisticated now that you want to take advantage of any little boost you can get to beat the system. You can also name your graphics with keywords.