ALT Codes:

There are still many people in the world who use very old browser. These were the first generation browsers. Very peculiar browses, they support only text and/or the very first version of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). They don’t understand frames neither have any capability to download images and present them to their viewers. The ALT code was probably included for these reasons in the modern browsers. ALT code is a text that is shown in place of an image if the browser cannot display images. Also, there are some people who disable the image-displaying property of their browsers so that the websites download faster. Since they cannot view the images, they see the ALT codes. (If you are using a browser which supports images you can still view the ALT code. To view take your mouse pointer over the image – the ALT text will appear and then disappear after a couple of seconds.)

The search engines had no way out but to support these ALT codes since browsers old or new support it. Note that the search engines DO NOT care about images – they are neither text nor something they can understand but they do care for the text in the ALT codes. So why not to use the ALT code optimally, especially when they can help us to achieve good search engine ranking.

You should use at least 2-3 popular keywords in the ALT codes. The text you use should have some relevance to the image. Just as an example, if the image is a logo of your company the ALT code could be the official name of the company.

Here’s is how to write ALT code:

<IMG SRC=”path of the image to be displayed” WIDTH=”width of the image in percentage or pixels” HEIGHT=”height of the image in percentage or pixels” ALT=”popular keyword 1, popular keyword 2, popular keyword 3″>

Where popular keyword 1, popular keyword 2, popular keyword 3 are your important alt code keywords that will help you to get top rank in the search engines. It is recommended that you define height and width of the images. This will speed up the process of displaying the page. If height and width is defined the browsers understand the space to be provided to the image and therefore go ahead to display the text on the page, else they wait for the image to be downloaded fully, display them and then display the text.

If your site has 15 images and you included 2-3 unique keyword/phrase in each image you end up including 30-45 important words in your site with no extra effort. This will surely boost your ranking. (Please note that there are certain browsers that do not support ALT codes, in that case you may not be able to see the ALT codes. For the best results it is advised that you view this site in a browser that supports ALT code.)

COMMENT Tag:

The COMMENT tag as the name suggests is used for comments in between HTML tags or text in a Web Page. Browsers do not display text written in the comment tag. It was probably made with the point to help the webmasters to know why a particular tag or command had been written or what their functions are. This being the case, most of the search engines too ignore the text written in the comment tag, but a few don’t.

The COMMENT Tag is written like this:

<!– This is a comment –>

The text you are seeing in between <!– and –> is not displayed by the browser.

Include a few important keywords in the comment tag. A big page may contain 4-5 comment tags with important keywords while a smaller one may contain 2-3. Construct a few sentences using your important keywords. Do not insert keywords one after another separated with commas. Convention is that this tag contains sentences to help webmasters. You are advised not to repeat the same sentences in any two comments present in your site although you can repeat the keywords. Try not to exceed 45 words in a comment tag so that it looks like a comment. You can make as many sentences as you want as long as you remember your limit. Not to mention, the sentences you construct in the comment tag should make some sense with what is there in the content of the web page.