Gain a few slots in Google by typing two words

[thatkeywordguy]

Hey guys, have you checked out the ALT tag in your blog's banner?

Unfortunately, many WordPress sites do them wrong.

(they just use the word "logo" or "header")

And this is of little SEO value. Ideally, the ALT tag will contain a keyword phrase that is making you money. And when you put this phrase in your banner alt tag, every page of your site will be pointing to the homepage -- for that keyword.

Here is Aaron Wall's Post on the importance of the banner alt tag.

Aaron's article

Here is a video I made last week on the subject:

YouTube video

What do you think? Ideas?

Thanks!

[omrishabbat]

Since the Panda update in October, i have noticed that these kind of things have a much greater effect on rankings. I suspect they did some algorithm change back then.

[thatkeywordguy]

My own theory is because they have devalued how much trust they give to the anchor text of offsite inbound links.

However, the contextual trust of your own internal links has remained the same (maybe gone up).

This has the effect of making a website's own internal links more important than they used to be.

And the header ALT tag method described above, is the most important internal link on your website.

[ThatAblaze]

Hey, amazing video. Very well edited, and very clearly explained. I learned something new from watching it

[John Williamson]

The alt tag of an image is important, and is one of the simplest things to fix/change. The alt tag for a logo is even more important considering it is at the top of the page, giving it more weight. Thanks for the video share.

[warriorspirit786]

Really interesting to know this.

Should i also rename the "Home" link on my site to my main keyword as i hear this is also good for SEO?

[dp40oz]

I have always found that any on page factor other then overall relevance of the content is about as powerful as 1 decent backlink. A terrible on page SEO score can always beat a perfect on page SEO score if it has better external backlinks. I appreciate the share but I do encourage people to understand, backlinks are 95% of ranking, worrying about tiny on page SEO optimization techniques isn't gonna amount to too much, especially in any niche thats even mildly competitive.

[alistair]

Originally Posted by dp40oz

I have always found that any on page factor other then overall relevance of the content is about as powerful as 1 decent backlink. A terrible on page SEO score can always beat a perfect on page SEO score if it has better external backlinks. I appreciate the share but I do encourage people to understand, backlinks are 95% of ranking, worrying about tiny on page SEO optimization techniques isn't gonna amount to too much, especially in any niche thats even mildly competitive.

If you saw a dollar laying on the street would you pick it up?

It probably won't make much difference to how rich or poor you are but every little bit helps.

[gearmonkey]

This is good info. I'm going to spend the day seeing what I can do on my wordpress blog

[UMS]

Although the importance of ALT tags isn't new to me, I have to congratulate you on producing a very good video on the subject.

[AndyBlackSEO]

Originally Posted by warriorspirit786

Really interesting to know this.

Should i also rename the "Home" link on my site to my main keyword as i hear this is also good for SEO?

I did a case study on this about 3 years or so ago which I posted on my blog. I wrote a couple of lines of PHP that divided my homepage link between 3 main keywords.

The site in question had a few hundred indexed pages at the time and my rankings for ALL three keywords shot up within a couple of weeks. I still had the word Home at the end of the anchor though.

[dminorfmajor]

Awesome info man. I've been in the business for almost 3 years now and that is one of the fundamental things that I've forgotten all about.

[thatkeywordguy]

Originally Posted by warriorspirit786

Really interesting to know this.

Should i also rename the "Home" link on my site to my main keyword as i hear this is also good for SEO?

If you look at the last 30 seconds of the video, you can see, its really important that your HOME link goes below the banner.

So long as your banner is properly made, and above the HOME text, then you're ok.

[thatkeywordguy]

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

For example, this old video by George (of the old "Sniper" course fame) is pretty interesting.

It shows the power of the EMD, and proper homepage linking, on a blank WordPress blog.

By default, the WordPress themes (then and now) would put your "blog title" as a text link on top of the site.

This is great if your blog title just happened to also be your primary keyword phrase (as is the case in the above video).

But when this is not the case, people have gotten in the habit of merely linking to their frontpage via their brandname, or a banner with an improperly filled out ALT tag.

[DWaters]

Thanks for sharing this simple but important technique. In my case I believe the theme I use has the Nav bar (which starts with Home) above the banner. Is there a workout around? Can I replace the word Home with the Keywords ??

[KingKuba]

I'll have to look into this, thanks for the video.

I know I'm still missing alt tags in my pics but one step at a time...

[peatermead]

Yes, the alt tag do has SEO effect but should be used wisely. No keyword spamming here,

[glock28]

wow i didn't even realize this thanks for the video

[Kung Fu Backlinks]

Great video. I'm always amazed at the number of very expensive, gorgeous websites made by pricey design firms that need basic SEO repair. These business owners are dropping thousands on web design, and the darn things aren't even made properly.

[KingKuba]

Is this also apply to blogger?

[mrgee]

Thought I might try this on some of my sites.. But how do you add alt tags to a header image in wordpress..?.. I can see from the source that the header image or logo as a title tag but NO alt tag.. I have alt tags on all my images but not the header or logo.. Can't figure out how to do it for the header image

[FreeMeal]

Originally Posted by mrgee

Thought I might try this on some of my sites.. But how do you add alt tags to a header image in wordpress..?.. I can see from the source that the header image or logo as a title tag but NO alt tag.. I have alt tags on all my images but not the header or logo.. Can't figure out how to do it for the header image

I'm finding the same problem. I uploaded my header image through the WP dashboard, in the Media Library I can locate the header image there and input the alt tags and description. The only problem is I'm not sure that has any effect on the header image. For some reason it still doesnt seem to display tags

[DWaters]

Thought I might try this on some of my sites.. But how do you add alt tags to a header image in wordpress..?.. I can see from the source that the header image or logo as a title tag but NO alt tag.. I have alt tags on all my images but not the header or logo.. Can't figure out how to do it for the header image

Yes, this is an issue for me. The banner on my blog is part of the theme. How do I access it to set the alt tag? Also the navigation bar, with the word HOME is on the very top. I am not sure how to implement this idea.

[np2012]

Very interesting, hadn't thought of doing that before.

[thatkeywordguy]

Originally Posted by KingKuba

Is this also apply to blogger?

Yes it should apply to all sites on the net.

[thatkeywordguy]

Originally Posted by mrgee

Thought I might try this on some of my sites.. But how do you add alt tags to a header image in wordpress..?.. I can see from the source that the header image or logo as a title tag but NO alt tag.. I have alt tags on all my images but not the header or logo.. Can't figure out how to do it for the header image

Unfortunately this is not always easy.

Editing someone else's CSS code is sometimes pretty tricky -- with or without WordPress.

There isn't one process that will work on every WordPress install. But typically, you need to get into Header.php and change a few lines. If you know which lines to change, then it usually goes pretty easy. But there are many ways to make banners and so, its best if you know css and php

[mrgee]

Originally Posted by thatkeywordguy

Unfortunately this is not always easy.

Editing someone else's CSS code is sometimes pretty tricky -- with or without WordPress.

There isn't one process that will work on every WordPress install. But typically, you need to get into Header.php and change a few lines. If you know which lines to change, then it usually goes pretty easy. But there are many ways to make banners and so, its best if you know css and php

CSS and php are 2 different things.. Beside CSS has nothing to do with alt tags..?
I understand some php and have looked at the header.php file for my template.. but it makes no mention of alt tags.. I will do some more research on this as I would like to be able to implement alt tags on my header images as suggested here..

[Search Engine Gecko]

Originally Posted by alistair

If you saw a dollar laying on the street would you pick it up?

It probably won't make much difference to how rich or poor you are but every little bit helps.

or a fiver to you n me

[thatkeywordguy]

Originally Posted by mrgee

CSS and php are 2 different things.. Beside CSS has nothing to do with alt tags..?

Sometimes the banner itself is a background jpg which is only accessible via the WordPress styles.css page. or, sometimes the header file itself might have other special php calls in it.

or, you could get lucky, and it will all be simple html.

[Tom Albas]

Originally Posted by thatkeywordguy

Hey guys, have you checked out the ALT tag in your blog's banner?

Unfortunately, many WordPress sites do them wrong.

(they just use the word "logo" or "header")

And this is of little SEO value. Ideally, the ALT tag will contain a keyword phrase that is making you money. And when you put this phrase in your banner alt tag, every page of your site will be pointing to the homepage -- for that keyword.

Here is Aaron Wall's Post on the importance of the banner alt tag.

Aaron's article

Here is a video I made last week on the subject:

YouTube video

What do you think? Ideas?

Thanks!

if someone used both tags like Tittle and alt tags then what happen.

<h1 id="site-title"><span><a rel="home" title="ABC – DCD - EFG" href="http://www.domain.com/"><img alt="ABCDEGFG" src="logo.png"></a></span></h1>

[thatkeywordguy]

Title tag does not pass SEO value.

It should be used as a "user hint"

Like "Click here to go to the homepage."

[mrgee]

Originally Posted by thatkeywordguy

Sometimes the banner itself is a background jpg which is only accessible via the WordPress styles.css page. or, sometimes the header file itself might have other special php calls in it.

or, you could get lucky, and it will all be simple html.

Thats true.. but the CSS file does not contain any reference to Alt tags.. It would only point to the image to use..

[jesustamez]

Great vid man!

Yeah I just went back to check on my sites.. turns out I'm part of the 80% of people that leave it out.. now I just have to figure out how to do it

[eshapard]

Nice tip... for some reason I never thought of optimizing the alt tag of the header image. Brilliant!

[Entrecon]

This is very nice, I appreciate you sharing this!

[thatkeywordguy]

Originally Posted by mrgee

Thats true.. but the CSS file does not contain any reference to Alt tags.. It would only point to the image to use..

the css contains the background image data for the div tag

you'll need to delete this from the css file

and then use a typical image placement html-based method on the header.php file

unfortunately many wp themes are setup this way.

[jesustamez]

Hey man I did the change three days ago and I have not built any new backlinks to my site and now I'm sitting on the very top of the second page of google.. pretty trippy stuff! Thanks for the share again!

BTW I'm using flexsqueeze, if any of y'all have trouble changing that around, go to the flexsqueeze forum I started a thread on there and Ryan was awesome and showed me step by step how to make the change. The steps are only for flexsqueeze..

[thatkeywordguy]

glad to hear it - good luck

[Cyber Rankings]

A few people are claiming that the effects of this small change doesn't do a thing however your wrong. Simple things like the tags of the images, title of your site etc can be the difference between #1 and #2.

For extremely low competition keywords good on-page seo is sometimes enough to get on the first page so take is seriously

[KingKuba]

Having trouble finding it....oh yeah forgot this code is not in my template

<div id='header-wrapper'>

I don't have that obviously, what code should I look for instead....

[Andylinks]

Thanks for reminding us (me) of this oldie. I use the tag, but not as religiously as I should. Will have a look at most of my sites to amend this.

[thatkeywordguy]

Originally Posted by KingKuba

Having trouble finding it....oh yeah forgot this code is not in my template

<div id='header-wrapper'>

I don't have that obviously, what code should I look for instead....

unfortunately every designer is a bit different

they usually call the div header something

but unless you know html and css, its sometimes easy to break the wp them

so save backups before you make changes

[jamesquin]

Surely, the competitiveness of the keywords makes a bog difference - ie if you're in a competitive market you probably won't see any benefits - on the other hand it can't hurt either

[ktotheb]

Great video!

Anyone know how to add ALT tags to a thesis header?

[thatkeywordguy]

Originally Posted by jamesquin

Surely, the competitiveness of the keywords makes a bog difference - ie if you're in a competitive market you probably won't see any benefits - on the other hand it can't hurt either

there are definitely some niches where it won't have much of an effect

also, i have 2 sites right now that seem to be sandboxed, and this trick is not helping at all of course.

It works particularly good if you have a site with lots of google love, and lots of interspersed pagerank to the SUB pages.

Because right now, if you have an improperly tagged header, then all of your nice sub-pages are linking back to your frontpage -- with the word LOGO (or some other stupid word)

So when you fix this one little thing on a site like that (and put your primary keyword phrase there), you could see quite a jump over night. Because, for sites like that, they are wasting link juice with meaningless words: e.g. logo. header, banner, etc...

[FrankRumbauskas]

Originally Posted by warriorspirit786

Really interesting to know this.

Should i also rename the "Home" link on my site to my main keyword as i hear this is also good for SEO?

What I did was replace the "Home" link with a graphic of the word "Home" and made the alt tag my primary keyword.

[DWaters]

I like this idea and it makes real sense. However I am lost when I try to do it. I have gone into my control panel and looked at the wp-theme and have not been able to find it, at least I don't think I found. ??? I do not want to srew up the theme.

[wilhouse]

Originally Posted by FrankRumbauskas

What I did was replace the "Home" link with a graphic of the word "Home" and made the alt tag my primary keyword.

good idea.

[thatkeywordguy]

Originally Posted by FrankRumbauskas

What I did was replace the "Home" link with a graphic of the word "Home" and made the alt tag my primary keyword.

exactly right. Many themes have an image for their home link. so change this image alt tag to the primary keyword phrase. Not "home"

[thatkeywordguy]

Originally Posted by DWaters

I like this idea and it makes real sense. However I am lost when I try to do it. I have gone into my control panel and looked at the wp-theme and have not been able to find it, at least I don't think I found. ??? I do not want to srew up the theme.

you'd have to know how to modify html and css

make sure YOU HAVE BACKUPS because its really easy to ruin a theme by deleting a few lines of code