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Informative Articles

7 Reasons to Add Podcasting to Your Business Marketing Mix
Copyright 2005 Rodney Rumford Leveraging podcasting technology can give you a marketing edge that will allow you to increase your online visibility, increase your client acquisition rates and improve customer loyalty. The smart businesses and...

Benefits to RSS Feeds
Benefits to RSS Feeds... Benefits to RSS RSS streamlines communication between publishers and readers. Since RSS has had a popularity surge, webmasters have been experimenting and using RSS feeds to deliver content in new and innovative ways....

Blogs, Blogs, Blogs! What They Are, and Why They Matter.
I remember that it was not that long ago that I did not know what a blog was or what one was for. Now blogs are everywhere and anyone with a computer and Internet access may be writing one. If you are new to this whole blog phenomenon let me...

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How affiliates can have their own radio show...
Copyright 2005 Kurma Group Before we start, I want to ask you one simple question. If you knew what you know today about how big blogging would be before it started, would you have started a blog? Well, in that case, you better pay close attention...

 
Google
SEO - keywords - image and alt tags

Last time we talked about the always visible elements on the page, specifically headings and visible text. If you have done a good job, you have 'threaded' your key phrase into the headings, title and content and still have excellent copy. It is important to get high rankings on the search engines, but that won't count if your page copy is gibberish because its stuffed with your key phrase.

Next we will look at the 'sometimes visible' elements on the page. Specifically these are the 'alt' tags on each image, and the text descriptions associated with hyperlinks. I call these 'sometimes visible' as they only appear after the cursor has been resting over the element for a little while.

The 'alt' tag on an image is an alternate description that is loaded if the browser has its image loading turned off. This used to be important when people surfed the web using slow modems, but these days, hardly anyone has their image loading turned off. This gives us an excellent opportunity to put content into the page that can be loaded


with our key phrase.

Again, be aware that the 'alt' tag description will show if the cursor is left over that image for any length of time, so you still have to write good copy, but as its an image description, there is a little more latitude than with visible copy.

The same is true for hyperlinks. There is an optional elemt called 'title' that again only shows when the cursor moves over the hyperlink, and is really designed to give the user a bit more information about the hyperlink.

Great! - another place for us to put our key phrase. Again, its worth repeating that this text is still visible, so don't go overboard, but some creative writing should allow you to do some threading.

More later.....

About the Author

Lee is one of the principals at Spinnaker Systems which provides Web related services to the small business owner. Lee can be contacted at lee@spinnakersystems.com and is a regular contributor to the Spinnaker Blog