SEO Explained- Page 12
Sitemaps & Image ALT Text

Making sure your page content is found

When the search engines visit your website to review all this great work you are doing, they use a little piece of software called a “spider”.  The spider “crawls” the web on a regular basis in order to inspect your site and identify any changes you’ve made.

Spiders can only find the internal pages inside your website if they can find a link to that page.   Some sites experience a serious problem where they don’t have a link pointing to their internal pages and therefore the search engine spiders never find these pages.

If your site uses a FLASH or JavaScript menu system, then the spiders may not be able to find all your internal pages.   One good way to ensure that all your internal pages are able to be found successfully is to employ a “Sitemap”.

A sitemap is just a page on your website that points to all the other pages on your website using a simple / standard HTML link format (ie not involving FLASH or Javascript etc).   By including a sitemap, and making sure that you have a link to your sitemap on your home page, in the footer area of your site – this will make sure that the spider can find your sitemap, and then use the sitemap to find all of your other pages.

There are many automated tools around that you can just point at your website, and these will then create a HTML sitemap which you can just upload to your website.   Here’s a site that I use sometimes to do this:  http://www.sitemapdoc.com, but there are many around and you may find another that you prefer (just do some Google searching on “site map generator”).

ALT Text for Images on a page

When inserting images into a HTML page, the <img xsrc=”image-locaiton”> tag is used.   This tag, also has provision for including “Alternate Text” which is shown when the image can’t be displayed.   While not critical to your SEO efforts, it’s a good idea to include ALT text for all images for example:

<img xsrc=”http://www.nikesneakers.com/images/nike-sneaker.jpg” alt=”Nike Sneakers”>

….as the search engines will index and recognise this ALTernate text as another contributor to identifying the “theme” used on your web page.

Page 13 - Building Links to your website