The Demo Site

Alt and Other Tags and Attributes

You’ve probably heard the term “alt tags” a time or two. It’s been mentioned more than once in this book. But hearing the term and understanding how it works are two different things.

The first thing you should understand about alt tags is that they’re not really “tags” at all. Rather, the proper name for these is alt attributes.The term “attributes” is used because these are (more accurately) different attributes that enhance the tags you use on your web site. Alt, which stands for alternative, is a specific type of attribute that refers specifically to the alternative text you may see in place of graphics.

Most people who are not professional web designers use the terms “tag” and “attributes” interchange- ably. That’s why you often see alt attributes referred to as alt tags.

Several different tags and attributes are used when placing keywords into the coding of your web site. This chapter covers five of them, but there are far more attributes on a typical web page. For example, although it’s not covered in this chapter, bgcoloris an attribute that’s often used on a web page to specify the background color of the page.

Title tags
Title tags are perhaps the most important SEO tags for any web site, and if you can place your keywords in the beginning of the title tag, that improves the effectiveness of those tags much more. The maximum number of characters allowed by most search engines for title length is 60 to 65 for proper display. However, a few search engines allow fewer or more characters in a title.

Search engine spiders use these title tags as the main source for determining the web-page topic.
Spiders or crawlers examine the title, and the words used in it are then translated into the topic of the page. That’s one reason it’s always best to use your keywords in your page title, and to use
them as close to the beginning of the title as possible. The text included in the title tag is also the text that will appear in SERPs as the linked title on which users will click to access your page.

For example, if you have an informational web site that provides guidelines for choosing retirement funds, and the most important keywords for your web site are “retirement funding” and “retirement income,” then a page title (which is the text used in the title tag) along the lines of “Retirement Funding Options to Increase Income,” is highly relevant to the topic of the site. Spiders will crawl your site, and because the title tag is the first element encountered, the spider will “read” it and then examine your site, as well as the keywords used in other places on your site (which you learn about shortly), to determine how relevant the title is to the content of the site.

That’s why it’s vitally important to target the most critical keywords in the title tag. You may use 20 keywords on your web page, but two or three of those keywords (or even just a single phase) are the most important keywords you’ve selected. These are the keywords that should be used in your title tag.

Another important factor to remember when using title tags in your web-site design is to create a unique title for every page in the site. Make the title as descriptive as possible, and again, use the most important or effective keywords you’ve selected for the page, because the words you use in your title tag will appear in the reverse title bar, or the tab title, of your web browser, as shown in Figure6-1.

Now that you know why you should use a title tag, the question becomes what exactly does a title tag look like, and where do you use it?


The best way to learn where you should place your title tag is to look at the source code for other
web sites. As Figure6-2 shows, the title tag is located within the head tag, along with the meta description tag and the meta keyword tag.

This illustration is taken from the actual source code for a real web site. However, it’s difficult to see exactly how the title tag comes between the opening and closing head tags, so here’s a little more simplistic view:

If you take this code apart line by line, here’s what you have:

: This is the opening head tag.

: This is the title tag, including both the opening and the closing code.

: This is the meta
description tag, where you place a brief description of your site, keywords included.

: This tag is where you’ll list the keywords that you’re using to describe your site. These could be either organic or purchased keywords.

: This is the closing head tag. It indicates that the information in the header of the page
has ended.

It’s important that the title tag appear somewhere within the opening and closing head tags. If the title tag is located in other places in your web-site encoding, it won’t render properly, and you’ll be left with a web site that doesn’t behave the way that you expect it to.

When creating your title tags, remember that the best title tags are those that contain targeted keywords, help develop the brand for the site, and are both concise and attention-grabbing. Usually, the text included between the opening and closing title tags also translates into the linked text that is displayed in search engine rankings. In other words, the title tag provides the first (and sometimes only) impression of your web page. It can either draw in visitors or cause searchers to choose a different search result altogether.

Meta description tags
Meta description tags are also important for every page on your web site. In some search engine
results, the text beneath the linked title (shown in Figure6-3) comes directly from the information included in the meta description tag.


Despite the fact that not all search engines use the description included in the meta description
tags, all of them do readthe description tag. They also use the description included there as one
of the factors considered during the ranking process.

The catch with meta description tags is that they work differently for different search engines. For example, Google gives very little weight to meta descriptions. Instead, the Google search engine looks at the text on a page. And on the SERPs, Google doesn’t display the meta description text either. What does show is the content surrounding the instance of the keyword on your site. Google calls this a snippet.

The Yahoo! search engine, however, does put weight on meta description text, and it uses that text directly under the web site link on SERPs.

So, what does this all mean? First, it means that your meta description tag isn’t the most important piece of coding your web page. However, it also means that you don’t want to skip over the meta description tag, because some search engines actually do use it.

So you should include the meta description tag on each page of your web site using the following
guidelines:

• Different search engines allow different description text lengths. A good rule of thumb is to keep your descriptions to around 200–250 characters. That’s about enough space for one to two descriptive sentences.
• Every page in your web site should include its own, unique meta description tag.
• Meta description tags should include keywords with high levels of importance or effectiveness.
• Meta description text should not be the same as the text included in the title tag.

Like the title tag, the meta description tag belongs inside the section of your web pages. Ordinarily, web-site designers include the meta description tag after the title tag and before the meta keywords tag, but that’s not set in stone. As long as the meta description tag appears between the opening and closing head tags, it will be read by crawlers as it should be.

When creating your meta description tag, this is what it should look like:


For example, the meta description tag that I might use for my personal web site would look like this:


It’s important to note that not everyone agrees on the value of the meta description tag. However, it takes very little time to include this tag (or any of the tags included in this section of the book) in your web-site coding; therefore, including it should be a given. As with many different strategies in SEO, these tags are not a sure thing, and they are not the absolute solution to ensuring that your site ranks well. But they are one more element that could affect your ranking, so including them should be automatic.