Watch out for Images

Websites are becoming increasingly graphic and abound in images. This does not prevent search engines from processing documents. But the fact is that they don't see images, which means that part of your website is ignored.

The problem can easily be circumvented by associating an alternative text with each image through the ALT tag:

<IMG border=0 width=468 height=60 src=http://www.site.com/image.jpg
alt="Our links page">

Associating an alternative text with an image offers three advantages:

• It provides surfers that have deactivated the display of images with a description.
  
  
• The content processed by search engines contains more information.
  
  
• Certain search engines, especially HotBot, attach greater importance to words used in links. So if you use image maps as links (for instance, as buttons), they will unfortunately be ignored. On the other hand, alternative text descriptions associated with images will be taken into account.