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IMG ALT attribute is an alternative text that is displayed to the user when the image is not found, giving the user a hint about what the image is. Typical example would go as this:

<img src=”/images/google-logo.jpg” alt=”Google logo” />

In most cases, you normally expect that the image will be shown rather than alternative text, and if you do have so many broken image links, then most likely the alternative text is not going to help you a lot attract many visitors anyways. That said however does not mean one should overlook the alt attribute at all, on the contrary. IMG ALT attribute is used by search engines like Google and Yahoo when indexing for images. The alt attribute is one very strong hint about the content of the image, and proper labeling would sure help the search engine return your images as relevant results to the users, and ofcourse, increase your site traffic.

Having followed that, and taking a look at Q8Ba7th site traffic, I found that over 3% of the total site traffic is coming from image searches, and not any image searches, but rather Google Image searches.

Two nice rules to follow for Image SEO are:

1. Image Names: Meaningful “-” separated file names, e.g. “Google-logo.jpg”
2. ALT Attributes: Short, meaningful and related, like alt=”Google logo”

Following such practices helps you get traffic, and the user get the desired images. Oh, and it also makes the job of the search engine a whole lot easier.

UPDATE: 3baid mentioned below the title attribute, which is used to give image description usually that the user sees when pointing his mouse over. It is also used for Image SEO, and while Google seems to be fine with one of them only, it’s probably a good idea for me as well to use both, as some other engines may use only one. I will need to look into how they treat it as spam. Video below posted on how Google treat the IMG attributes.

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During the building of Q8Ba7th direcotory of Kuwaiti sites, I have noticed an enormous number of sites using Flash as their intro page, with or without a real good reason. Flash is just used because it looks cool. People don’t take in mind what message they want to convey to their users, or what their users really want from visiting the site. Many government sites have even some long and heavy flashy intro pages, and the misery rise when there is no link to bypass it. Flash is a real cool technology to insert animation and present demos online. But intro pages were just cool the old days, and no one will visit your site back for some fancy flash you made (or taken from somewhere else). When designing a site, there are many things to keep into consideration, and Flash intro pages should be avoided in most cases for the following reasons:

• Load time: Flash sites take long to load, wasting user time and bandwidth.
• Bad Experience: The faster and easier I can make use of site visit, the more I am likely to visit it again.
• SEO Effect: Flash components are non-indexable by search engines. A front page is the first page a search engine usually sees, and if that page has no indexable content, then the search engine may not bother (or be able) to index the rest of the site. It’s kind of locking the front door from visitors. Ofcourse, search results are one of the great free ways to generate huge amount of traffic, and leaving that portion of traffic means you have to rely on ads and word of mouth mostly.
• Flash Support: This is a very low rate I know, but still some browsers and users don’t have Flash running, and you would be denying them access to your site.
• Meaningless: Very often, the Flash is simply a moving animation of site name and some text, not sending any message to the visitor. A government does not need promotion it self at all. It’s an official site. One of a kind in each country. Zero competition. Just deliver the content and services the user want. He will come back trust me on that one.

Some may argue they really really need a Flash intro site, or their whole site is Flash based. What to do in that case?

• Have some meaningful title and meta content on the intro page.
• Always always have a text based Skip Intro link. Leave it outside the Flash. That way, you are giving the customer a quick way to skip the Flash and go inside the site, not having to wait for any Flash load. And, you are also giving search engines an entrance point to the rest of your site, making it indexable.
• Try to deliver some side content around the Flash as well. See Snap for instance.
• Provide Flash  Alternative: If Flash is not supported, provide text based version of the site.
• Flash size: Be considerant to the Flash size as this is the first page the visitor sees, and if it takes long, it may be his last. If you can’t avoid large Flash size, then be sure to have progressive loading. Give something to the user as long as it’s ready. This makes the loading transient for him.
• Modifiable: Many Flash are just designed or one time and no thought of future modification was ever made. If there is a slight chance this would need to change in the future, try to accommodate for it ahead of time.

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Few weeks back I have started moderating all the comments, sadly, and added an extra math challenge that you have to pass before being able to post on my blog. I did not include any advanced math nor Laplace, but it’s just to increase the IQ of people posting in my blog to a limit of a decent human being. Sadly, I never wanted to do this, but I started getting over 40 spam posts in 10 minutes!. As an apology, and also a thank for people who do still pass all the tests, I have removed the NoFollow attribute from user comments. So now:
rel=’external nofollow’ => rel=’external’

So what is NoFollow? and why did I remove it? NoFollow was presented to fight spam. People tend to post their site link everywhere they can to increase their site popularity, and blogosphere is the best place for it. NoFollow is embedded automatically with visitor comments, to tell search engines like Google, this link came from a comment to a post and is not an out going link from me. Since I am moderating each and every comment, and all comments appearing on my site are legitimate, I figured there is no harm at all in giving commenter his right of link. So enjoy visitors, now your comment values for more. Special thanks to DoFollow plugin.

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SearchEngineJournal have revealed the results of their competition for the best SEO Blog for 2006. You can see the results here and find use of the top blogs.

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