Importance of titles and ALT tags to your website

Google webmaster guidelines > Design and Content guidelines > Guideline six of nine in this category states...

"Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate."

Definitions-

TITLE - the title of a webpage.

ALT tag - A HTML tag that assigns the description of an image.

Examples and Explanations

Titles -

What are titles?

Titles are a short and concise description of a webpage.

An accurate and descriptive title helps both people and search engines determine what a web page is about.

Titles are important and very visible to users. Having a descriptive and accurate title allows people to choose your page above others in a list of search engine results.

Titles should be page specific -

If you have a website about pets that has pages about dogs, cats, and turtles...

The dog page should have a title including "dogs". - The cat page should have a title including "cats". - The turtle page should have a title including "turtles".

They are different pages therefore they require different titles.

Why titles are important:

Titles play a large part in why people visit your website. The listings in search engines are just lists of titles and descriptions of sites. Depending on what people see in those titles, they choose which websites they will visit. Just like you do.

The title of a web page can be compared to the sign of a typical brick and mortar store. If you had one chance to tell people what that one specific web page is about, what would you say?

Your title also is the most visible and repeated part of your webpage on a users computer screen. Here are some places your title is displayed...

The title of a web page is displayed in search engine results...

the title as displayed in a search engine result

the title is displayed at the top left of your web browser...

the title as displayed in a web browser

The title is displayed at the bottom of the screen...

The title is also displayed as "tabs" in the new Internet Explorer and in Firefox...

The two most common mistakes made by webmasters are:

- each page of their website having the same title

- having the titles on their website list their keywords instead of accurately describing the page

Examples of common mistakes:

If each page in your website has the same title, you are not following this guideline.

If any two pages in your website has the same title, you are not following this guideline.

If you title does not accurately describe the contents of the page you are not following this guideline.

If the title of your "dog" page on your site is "Dog dogs dogsdogs dawgz dog dog doggy dog" you are not following this guideline.

When deciding upon titles for your web pages is is probably good to keep in mind that the only thing Google recommends about titles is to make them descriptive and accurate.

What your title looks like in HTML-

The "title tag" of your webpage assigns the title. It looks like this... <title>Your title goes here</title>

To learn more about HTML and how to change your title please use the "resources" listed below for more information.

Alt tags -

ALT tags provide a text alternative to an image.

They are a way to "describe" an image to those who can not see the image. The most important function of an ALT tag is to explain to a blind user what an image is displaying. Search engine crawlers also use ALT tags to decipher what an image is or what it is representing.

If you have images on your web pages that are not described by an ALT tag your HTML is not valid and you are not following this (and other) guidelines.

What should go in a Alt tag?

It is recommended to "use text that fulfills the same function as the image". When deciding upon the text you use to describe your images it very important that you keep the people who are unable to see your images in mind.

A great example of this is ...

If a 'question mark' icon or image is used to represent the help page, the alternative text should be 'help' or something similar.

Alt tags that are full of keywords are not following this guideline and are disruptive for blind users. It is often not understood that when a blind person is surfing the web they are normally using software that reads aloud the entire page. Can you imagine how irritating it would be to have to listen to an ALT tag that is "stuffed" with keywords?

There is ample information available on the web concerning the proper use of ALT tags. (see "Resources" below).

Key Concepts

Titles are page specific and should accurately describe each page, therefore no two titles on your website should be the same

ALT tags should be used to accurately describe the images on your page. They should not be used to add keywords to your page.

How to determine if your website is following the guideline

Checking for accurate titles can be accomplished by taking advantage of the "site:" operator of Google search. To do this go to Google and type in...

site:www.yourwebsite.com

This will result in Google listing all the pages of your website that it knows about. This is a useful and quick way to determine if your titles are unique. Look through the results and make sure that no two of your titles are the same.

Here is an example using Feedthebot.com...

Site operator example

Checking for ALT tags can be accomplished by visiting validator.W3.org and put your web address in to see if your HTML is correct. One of the most common HTML errors is not have ALT tags for your images. If you check your page through this tool, you can at least determine if each of your images have an ALT tag associated with them. It will not tell you if they are accurate, you will have to determine that for yourself. If you have a picture of a cat the ALT tag of that image should say "cat", not "dog".