A Scientific View of Alt Tags – Qualified Leads Up
- May, 11 2010
- By Rusty Bishop
- Lead Generation, Online Marketing, Science Sales
- 10 comments
By now you know exactly, why its critical to title images correctly online. In this article, Im going to help you supercharge your organic search engine clicks and qualify those searchers before they visit.
How?
Alt tags!
Is this some kind of black hat SEO? Nope, its even recommended by the search engine wizard Google herself.
Thou shalt ….
…..Create great alt text
In all seriousness, if Google took the time to make an entire web page about image alt tags and a YouTube Video about how to write them, perhaps we should pay attention.
Here’s why.
Scientists use Search Engines to find exact reagents and equipment for experiments. For example, I would search “antibody human Akt1 Western blot” to find that antibody. In this example, I am an extremely qualified buyer. You’ll notice that I know exactly what I’m looking for an antibody for Akt1 that reacts to human samples by Western blot.
Scientists smart enough to know that more terms you add to your search string the better your chance of FAST success. Admittedly, this is due to Google’s indexing of scientific full-text and thereby the methods sections where reagents are discussed in context. But companies can get in the game!
The reason I know not one single antibody company is using alt tags correctly is no images came up when I searched.
No Title + No Alt tags = No Clicks
Yet by clicking on the images link in the upper left shows me hundreds of Western blots on Antibody company’s websites like Cell Signaling, Abcam, Santa Cruz, etc. Pretty much all the companies spending money on Google Adwords for Akt antibodies (green $ above).
Why didn’t they appear in the organic results above? The answer is they lack alt tags and proper titles for Google to understand exactly what they are even though they know the images are on a webpage about Akt antibodies.
Don’t make Google guess! Improve those alt tags and get more qualified leads today by getting your product into the organic results.
Attracting qualified leads online requires constant vigil. If you have questions about how to use alt tags, request a free consultation from Red Funnel. Our team is here to help.
Red Funnel
A Scientist's View of the Importance of Alt Tags on Your Site. http://ht.ly/1JCHu
Mark Walker
RT @redfunnl: A Scientist's View of the Importance of Alt Tags on Your Site. http://ht.ly/1JCHu
Joseph Rusty Bishop
RT @redfunnl: A Scientist's View of the Importance of Alt Tags on Your Site. http://ht.ly/1JCHu
Joseph Rusty Bishop
RT I enjoyed writing this one @redfunnl Importance of Alt Tags on Your Site. http://ht.ly/1JCHu #webmarketing
Writing proper scientific alt text | How to Sell to Scientists
[...] I wrote about alt tags and why its critical to use them to describe your scientific products on your website to capture [...]
Jon Moulton
OK Rusty, you’ve convinced me. I’m about halfway through the Gene Tools website, adding alt tags to the images with descriptions of the images. I decided to describe the images in the alt tags so that they would communicate usefully to those using braille readers or other non-image browsers, figuring that these descriptions would also likely contain appropriate keywords (and I am writing them with an eye to using appropriate key terms to catch searches). I’ll let you know if I start seeing images from the website in Google searches.
Best wishes,
– Jon
JRB
Awesome Jon. I suspect Google already think GeneTools is an expert site on morpholinos, so it might take too long to index correctly. I am finishing up an article tonight that shows a successful alt tag used by Fermentas.
Can you give me an example of an image on your site and how you decided to tag it?
Jon Moulton
From the page:
http://www.gene-tools.com/node/18
Here are the alt tags I used on the first six images — more than you asked for, but if you find these useful you are welcome to use them as examples etc. (perhaps these will go in the what-not-to-do section…which is fine, but teach me how to improve them)
First image, figure 1 panel 1
alt=”Figure showing target regions used in a Morpholino oligo-walking experiment through a region of RNA secondary structure in a hepatitis B virus leader sequence.”
Second image, figure 1 panel 2
alt=”Figure showing relative activity of oligos targeted along a hepatitis B virus leader sequence.”
Third image, figure 2
alt=”Morpholino oligo target positions versus antisense activity along a hepatitis B virus leader sequence with positions walked across the AUG start codon.”
Fourth image, figure 3
alt=”start sequence of an mRNA showing the first 25 coding bases, including the start AUG, as a good default target choice for a Morpholino oligo.”
Fifth image, figure 4
alt=”Image comparing self-complementary sequences within oligos; the 16-contiguous-hydrogen-bond self-complementarity is considered acceptable for a Morpholino oligo while the 18-bond self-complementarity is not.”
Sixth image , figure 5
alt=”Relationship of Morpholino oligo length to oligo activity in a cell-free translation system.”
JRB
Jon, No problem. I had a look at the page this morning and your images. Its a great start. I ended up writing so much I had write a new blog post with your our conversation.
Update on Alt Text Article
Example of proper image text for scientist searchers | How to Sell to Scientists
[...] post is in response to a comment string from a previous article on scientific alt text. It illustrates an example of building website content from the scientific visitor [...]