ALT Tags According To Google's Matt Cutts

I had been doing a lot of research about how to properly tag images since the summer when I read an article in Digital Web about Google Universal Search. There was suprisingly little information available at the time, considering how big social photo sites like Flickr have become.

Finally, Google is speaking vis a vis Matt Cutts -- head of Google's webspam team. In Cutt's ALT tag video he talks about how you can use ALT tags to tell Google more about what is in an image file and boost it's page ranking.

Here are some highlights:

1. Including ALT text with your images will help Google to better identify its contents



2. ALT tags do not need to be long. Cutts' tag was 7 words. Even 25 is too much.



3. An ALT tag used in conjuction with a descriptive filename (cat.jpg versus ds134.jpg, for example) will improve the searchability of your images even more

Everything you need for Googlebot to work correctly

It seems that the bloggers at Google have been talking a lot about Googlebot, so I am going to do a little link roundup and maybe come back and do a post or two about one aspect of Googlebot or another. Having read each of these entries in detail, it seems that taken as a group a Web developer or Webmaster should have just about everything they need to make sure Googlebot is functioning correctly on their site.

1. All about Googlebot - Q&As about about robots.txt files and Googlebot's behavior fielded by Google Webmaster Central founder Vanessa Fox.




2. How to verify Googlebot - Google SEO specialist Matt Cutts talks about how to determine a bot is authentic.




3. Learn more about Googlebot's crawl of your site and more! - Vanessa Fox discusses new additions to Google Webmaster tools meant to help the Webmaster track the bot better.




4. Googlebot activity reports - Google blogger explains how the company tracks the amount of traffic between Google and a given site.




5. Better details about when Googlebot last visited a page - Vanessa Fox breaks this very confusing subject into excellent detail.