20 things about Google - Thing 06 – A new use for your Alt tag!
In my previous blogs I have written about the importance of starting from where you are geographically. This is because Google really wants to promote your business locally, at no actual cost to you. This is a recurring theme in my blogs and I want to take it one stage further by telling you something I am fairly confident you don’t already know
Take a look at this picture below:
This is from a standard brochure website (one of our own Run Your Own Websites actually). The phone icon indicates where you actual phone number is. It is shown twice, once in the header and once in the footer, along with your other contact details. Fairly standard stuff, this will be the same for every page on your website, so your phone may typically appear 20 times on a 10 page website. Actually it would be 21 times because your contact page should also contain your address, phone number and contact form. So far so good?
OK, now look at this picture.
We now see 7 phone icons! This means we have just increased the amount of times that Google sees our phone number several times over!
So how did we achieve this? By which Dark Art were we able to tell Google 7 times over what our phone number is?
Simple.
The humble Alt tag which is attached to every image on our website.
All we have to do is make sure we use our phone number on the end of the Alt tag for each image on our website. Google will pick it up and it will further cement your local phone number as being of high importance. So much so that you should see an increase in your Google Local rankings once you address this! If you want to go further, you can put it in the image description too! This may even get the odd phone enquiry from someone who has looked at an image on your website via Google Images!
I can’t guarantee this will transform your rankings but, in the competitive world in which we live, every little bit helps!
If you are looking to see how we at Access by Design, an award-winning web design Chichester company could help you then please call us right away, on 01243 776399! (Yes extra brownie points for including it in the text as well!)
Next time... HTML5. An absolute must but what does it mean?
Clive Loseby
Access by Design