What are ALT tags?
ALT tags are the little rectangular boxes of text that appear when you place your cursor over an image. The text will be shown in browsers which cannot display images, or if the user has chosen not to view images. Some search engines use this text to capture keywords for the web-page.
Audiences for ALT tags:
* Sighted readers who choose to browse the web without graphics being displayed
* Blind and sighted readers who access a page using audio-based browser technologies
* Automated indexing programs utilize ALT text as part of the page’s contents
Some of the biggest website promotion casualties on the World Wide Web are documents whose authors didn’t take the indexing robots seriously. T he indexing robot is one of the most important readers of your website. Since graphics cannot be interpreted by web crawlers ALT tags improve Search Engine Optimization of your website because they associate a keyword with a graphic.
Unlike ALT tags, META tags do not produce any visible spin off for your text-mode human readers. Effort spent on your ALT texts produces benefits for both kinds of “reader”....