Alt Tags

Your website graphics won't be visible to some users who use text-only clients such as lynx. Your website graphics won't be visible to Google or other search engines except as images that they may index into their image search and even then probably not if you do not include an alt tag.

The amount of CPU required for image recognition pretty much precludes search engines from being able to recognize images directly, however, they can read "alt" arguments in <img> tags easily.

So if your site uses graphical links for navigation, you also want to put equivalent text in an "alt" argument in the <img> tag so that when Google analyzes your page they can get the link text from that alt tag and know that it matches the content of what it is linked to.

This will also benefit users using text only clients who would otherwise be unable to navigate your site. Here is an example from this blog:

<a href="http://www.eskimo.com" onmouseover="img_on('excite')" onmouseout="img_off('excite')"><img height="133" width="200" border="0" name="excite" src="/images/excite2-off.jpg" alt="Excite Your Website with Eskimo North Hosting!"></a>

Incidentally, there is an easier way to make a mouseover affect using the css hover pseudoclass, but for the sake of demonstrating the use of the alt argument I used this example.

Previous Post (Google Site Map Program) Error

I made an error in the previous post in the link to the Google Site Map Program, that has been corrected. There is also a link in the side bar.

Google Site Map Program

Google does attempt to make things easy for us to get our websites indexed and ranked decently. They provide free tools to assist in this process and I would highly recommend taking advantage of them. After all they are free and they're solid information providing tools.

You should have your site participate in the Google Site Map Program. For free, zero dollars, just a little effort on your part, this program allows you to analyze and optimize your search for Google indexing and searches. Whatever you can do that makes your site rank higher on Google will make it rank higher on most other search engines.

Google Site Map will allow you first to identify yourself as the owner of the website in question, then it will provide you with all sorts of detailed statistics regarding searches, ranking, and analysis of your site. You'll be able to see how many links your site has from where, and what keywords people used when they found your site. You'll be able to set Google's crawl rate so it refreshes your site adequately without swamping it.

The data sitemaps provides, the keywords people use to link to you and the keywords people use to search that resulted in your site being included in the results and the ranking in those results is very valuable as it will allow you to tune your sites title, meta data, and content to match these.

You sign up for the service, then you claim websites that are yours. There are a variety of ways to do this, one involves placing a meta tag they provide into your web page. After you do this Google will crawl the page and check for it's existence and after that you are the recognized owner at which point you can get all sorts of useful information about your site and how Google and end users see it.

Style Sheets and Search Engines

If you're one of the people who, like me, learned HTML when the current server software was NCSA 1.0, you've probably put off style sheets.

I've been slowly converting my sites to use them, as well as working towards xhtml compliance. I'm converting to style sheets for the sake of the search engines, a prettier look, and ease of site maintenance. I'm trying to make things xhtml compliant to do the right thing. I'd like to say I'm converting to xhtml so that my code displays the same on all browsers but there appears to be at least as much incompatibility in browser interpretation of xhtml code as there was in html.

I've heard it said that search engines expect to find correct code and rank sites higher accordingly, but studies I've seen have not shown this to be true. Proper use of spelling and grammar is important but presently most search engines appear to be relatively insensitive to correct html. I expect it's possible at some point in the future so one should probably work towards making their code as correct as possible now.

Style sheets can help improve search engine ranking by improving keyword density and by making more of your sites text accessible to search engines. How can style sheets, which only serve to specify how your text is displayed, make your sites text more accessible? Many search engines will only read the first X bytes of a document, perhaps the first 64kB, and ignore the rest even if another 14mB follows. The reasoning is that if the keyword doesn't appear near the top of the document, it isn't important enough to be ranked sufficiently high to have any chance at being seen among the higher ranking documents.

If 80% of the first 64kB of your document is tags that could be extracted and placed in a style sheet, things like, and arguments to <table>, <td>, <tr> and <body> tags, then only 20% or 12.8 kBytes of your document will be seen by search engines and those tags will dilute the keyword density giving even that portion that is indexed a lower ranking.

If you haven't yet learned cascading style sheets, I would suggest the CSS tutorial at w3school.