ALL-NET – Tech & Webmaster blog

Tech & Webmaster blog

Importance of ALT Tags

July 19, 2010 | Posted in SEO, Tagged , ,

Lets first define what an alt tag is and where you can find them. Alt tags or alternative text are the small text boxes that appear when you hover your mouse over an image or button on a website. They contain descriptive information about that particular image or the destination of the button.

Look at the two examples below. On the left, the mouse is hovering over a button that links to a page described as Free SEO Tool in the alt tag.

x10media is very good at SEO

Alt tags are mainly used by people who cannot see images on your website. Im sure you remember the dial-up age when websites took what seemed like forever to open, especially the ones with a lot of images. Some browsers had an option to turn images off. This allowed websites to open much faster. In place of the images were alt tags, describing the image that was suppose to be there. Of course dial-up modems have become out-dated and a thing of the past so why are we still using alt tags?

Alt tags are also used in major search engine algorithms. Search engine robots or spiders cannot read images; however they can and do read alt tags. Alt tags help search engines learn more about your website, especially those that lack a lot of content. If used correctly it will even help your website rank higher. Good and descriptive alternative text should be placed on all images, pictures and buttons according to the Design and Content Google Guidelines.

Alt Tag are also used by Google to classify and index the images from your web sites! Of course that is more important for an Desktop Wallpapers Site like anime wallpapers where you got thousands of pics. But even with smaller sites not related to pictures, it can reprensent a good amount of visitors!

Another good reason to use alt tags is accessibility. People with physical disabilities like the blind want to access your website. The buying power of the blind is in the billions and yes, they are frequent web surfers and home Workers!. However, instead of being able to read content on your website its read to them by the computer using a simple application. They cannot see images or buttons on websites so alt tags allow them to get a good description of the image or button. In country or provinces like In Quebec, Canada, this is a requirement form the government on regarding the big web site to make the sites accessible.

So make it a priority, make sure your web design firm uses good, descriptive alt tags on all of your images. A good way to test your website is to simply rollover all your images and look for alt tags. You can also use our Free SEO Tool to determine if youre missing any alt tags.

AdSense Do’s and Donts

June 20, 2010 | Posted in Adsense Tips, Tagged , , ,

Adsense is Google’s way of motivating people to create sites with good content. Here are some rules to follow to make sure you get the best out of your Adsense account.

DOs

Create sites which are easy to navigate and have good content.

Track your Adsense clicks and try to add content related to what your website visitors want.

DON’Ts

Never, never, never, never, never ask your visitors to click on your ads. This is a strict NO according to the Google Adsense TOS, and this is one of the main reasons that your account could be shut down. (more…)

Submit your site to directories is useless

May 25, 2010 | Posted in SEO, Websites, Tagged , ,

Google’s Webmaster Central team has posted a video Matt Cutts that answers the question: “Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW as source of paid links? If no, why is this different from another site that sell links.

this is a very important answer for all of us. Look at it!

(more…)

SEO Missed opportunities

May 18, 2010 | Posted in SEO, Tagged , ,

Every day we spot missed opportunities online. Often, many of these problems are simple to remedy. Here the top five missed opportunities we come across on a regular basis:

1. Missing or duplicate meta data – Having no meta data or having it simply repeat the brand is an obvious SEO problem that is easy to fix most of the time. The same goes for duplicate meta data – sometimes the developers will repeat the same meta tags throughout the whole website, which the search engines may read as duplicate content, resulting in a failure to rank.

2. Text as images – Content is king online, so dont lock up your text in Flash or as images, no matter how cool it might look. If you dont give the search engines content to crawl you will have a hard time ranking no matter what else you do.

3. No internal linking – A solid internal linking strategy helps your users navigate through your site and it ensures that the search engines crawl and rank your website. (more…)

How to transfer a your domain to another registrar?

April 25, 2010 | Posted in Domains, Tagged , , ,

How to transfer a your domain to another registrar

Now this happens many times, especially with the newbie webmasters. They go for the “Hosting + Domain Registration” combo package from a local company at considerably high price for inadequate services. And when they check out the price and services offered by other reputable Hosting companies/ Domain Registrars, they want to change their Host/ Registrar.

Changing host, is comparatively easy..but what can be more difficult is Registrar shifting. So lets start with the Registrar Shifting process.

First of all choose a suitable Domain Registrar, depending upon your needs. You must always check for the promotional offers available with various big Domain Registrars. Keep in mind “Domain Transfer” is not a free process. The registrar will charge some fee, approx. to 1 yr. “.com” registration fee – i.e. $7-8. Many registrars give 1 yr. registration free with transfer.

Now, once you’ve chosen your new registrar, go to your old Registrar’s domain manager and look for the security code. If you have locked the domain, first step will be to unlock it. Once you got the security code. Go to new Registrar, check for “Domain Transfer” option and enter that code.

If you have entered the code correctly, there will be one notification on the email address associated with that domain. When you rceeive that email, you need to do nothing. Just wait for the estimated days, usually upto 7 days, and you can see your domain in new Registrar’s Domain List.

Thats it, you have transferred your domain successfully to your new Registrar.

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