Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.

Above mentioned Google webmaster guidelines 6/9 says about the importance of having a title and image alt tags for your WebPages. Titles are powerful places on your website that can help you tagged in search engine indices for a particular keyword. Title here refers to the title of a web page. It is a short and concise description of your web page. It is a common behavior that when we search for something in the internet, we will read the title of the search listing to know whether that website will help me find the answer to my question. Writing an accurate and descriptive titile helps both people and search engine in determining what the web page is all about. You need to always remember that it is visible in two ways to your visitor. It will be shown as the title of the browser which the visitor use to view your website, and it allows people to choose the right page listed in the search result for which he/she was seaching for. The best title that describes your website will always stand out in search results.

It is highly important that the title you write for the web page need to be specific to the page. If your website sells cloths and you have Mens wear, womens wear, children wear etc, the mens wear page need to have Mens wear in the page title, so that people and search engines can understand what your page speaks. You also need to make sure that all the pages need to have different and unique title. No two page in a website can be similar, so no two page can have the same title.

Why page titles are important?

Page titles play a vital role in why people visit your website. The search listing for any keyword will results in a list of Web page titles and a two lines of website description. Depending on what they see in the search listing, they will click on it and the more your title matches the website content, you will get clicks and people will stay in your website than bouncing back to your competitor websites.

Your title also is the most visible and repeated part of your webpage on a users computer screen.

Other than this the title is also displayed at the bottom of the screen and also on the name of the tag when you open a new tab in your website browser.

Listed are some examples where you make some common mistake:

• If the title of your “cars” page on your site is “Cars car cars caar,car’s,carcar” you are not following this guideline.
• If any two pages in your website has the same title, you are not following this guideline.
• If each page in your website has the same title, you are not following this guideline.
• If you title does not accurately describe the contents of the page you are not following this guideline.
• Always remember that the only thing Google recommends about titles is to make them descriptive and accurate.

About the usage of Alt tags:

Alt tag or alternate tag is a text alternative to an image. It is the best way to describe an image to those who can’t see the image. The most important job of the alt tag is to explain to a bind user what an image is displayed on the page. Search engine spiders are also blind at images, they can’t read the text or object that is printed in an image. The alt tag deciphers what the image is for or what it is representing.

If you have a blank alt tag on your html it is considered as invalid and it is not following the Google webmaster guidelines. It is recommended to “use text that fulfills the same function as the image”.

Alt tags that are full of keywords are not following this guideline and are disruptive for blind users. It is often not understood that when a blind person is surfing the web they are normally using software that reads aloud the entire page. Can you imagine how irritating it would be to have to listen to an ALT tag that is “stuffed” with keywords?

You can check whether your website is following Google webmaster guidelines by typing site:www.yourdomain.com

It will list all the pages that are indexed in the search engines. Do a quick review as a user searching for a particular keyword that he searched for. Do you feel that you are forced to click on the links by looking at the title? Are all the page titles unique..

Check it out and make your pages stand out and search engines will love it.To check your alt tags you can use validator.w3c.org. Put your website ulr and check whether the html code is clean. You can see errors if you have missed an alt tag. The accuracy of the title tag cannot be determined by using any tool. You need recheck all images to verify this.

Hope this post helped you explain what Google mean by the 6th webmaster guideline “Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and  accurate.”