File Names, Anchor Text, & ALT Tags

Welcome back to Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays! I am your host, Jonathan Kraft and today, we’re going to be talking about four very, very important things in terms of getting search traffic from the search engines. These four things are:

  • File Names
  • Anchor Text
  • Link Titles
  • Alt Tags

So we’re going to go through these one by one.

I want to show you some different examples of file names. We’ll just start with file names. So we’re in Google here and we’re going to do a search for something really obscure … I don’t know, something like underwater basket weaving (That’s funny, Underwater Phantaseas is where we’re doing our scuba diving training!).

Let’s try this and see what we get.

Alright, so we have “Underwater Basket Weaving” at Wikipedia, of course; Wikipedia comes up very well.

We have “Underwater Basket Weaving tips” at Blogspot.com.

We also have image results and this is going to be very important in just a minute.

I’m going to go ahead and open these pages from Wikipedia and the page from Basket Weaving Tips.

I want to show you a couple of things. In the actual name of this page, it has “Underwater_basket_weaving.” All three of those words are actually in the title and in the actual name of the page: underwater_basket_weaving.

If you want to get ranked for some term, it’s important that your page title which you actually name the HTML of your title of your page, actually says what it is you are talking about.

Here’s another example; we have “basketweavingtips.blogspot.com” followed by “underwater-basket-weaving-ever-wanted.html”. “Underwater Basket Weaving — Ever Wanted To Try It?” They got to number 3 behind Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary!

And you’ll notice also here in the title they have “underwater%20basket%20weaving.” That’s the page name for that.

One of the ways to get ranked in a search engine is to make sure that when you are naming pages with an HTML file, that you actually name them with the actual terms of what you’re looking for.

Let’s say you’re inside of WordPress; we’re inside of WordPress for our web site Green Joyment for the store here and let’s say I want to go ahead and Add a New Post.

I wanted to add a post about “Build Your Own Wind Generator.” Now I have GreenJoyment.com/store/build-your-own-wind-generator. That’s great! That’s a great keyworded title. If I wanted to change it though and actually change the page name so that it didn’t match what my text was in here, I could do that.

There are some times you’ll want to do that and sometimes you don’t. You’ll just kind of have to go and say, well, is my title relatively keyworded to what I’m saying? Because sometimes you might be talking in your article about building your own wind generator, but you might want to write a title that’s like, “People said I couldn’t do it!” Or something like that; maybe that’s what you want the title of the article to be, but it’s actually about building your own wind generator.

So you want to make sure that the actual file name is actually something that is going to get you traffic for what you are trying to get ranked for and not just something cute. If you’re going for a cute title or a fun title or something like that, “they said I couldn’t do it;” you want to make sure even if you do that, the page name (the actual file name) is something that’s relevant to whatever it is that you’re talking about.

That’s one of our topics for today.  Moving into the next topic, we’re talking about anchor text. We’re actually going to talk about file names too because let’s say now that I actually was talking about wind generators and I wanted to have a picture in this about wind generators.

Well, what I’ve done here is a Google search for wind generators.  I’m going to do an image search for wind generators.

Now one way that people actually come up for this search result in Google Images, and this can be a good way to bring traffic to your site, is by keywording your images correctly. We’ve got Wind Turbines here, if I click on this image, you can see here in the title or in the actual file name its “wind-turbine.jpg.” I do not think you should take other people’s images!

However, if you find an image source that is “open source” and you actually want to use it in something and it’s something you can use, you’re allowed to use – let’s go ahead and save this image as; we’ve save this image somewhere on my computer, we’ll just put it into the right folder here. So I’m in my GreenJoyment folder and I’m going to click “images” and this is called “wind-turbine.” I think I already have one in here … nope; I don’t have one in here called wind-turbine. So I’m going to save this as “wind-turbine” or maybe even “unique-wind-turbine” or whatever.

Again, don’t steal other people’s images! But if you have a source where you can get free images, we’ll probably do a video on that at some point in the future where you can get actual free images. If people are interested in that, please comment below and let me know and I can do a video about how to get free images.

But we’ll go ahead and click “Save” here and we’re going to save this as “unique-wind-turbine.” You can see I’ve got that saved now as “unique-wind-turbine.jpg.”

I’m going to go into my entry here and I can add an image using WordPress, you know how to do this I’m sure if you’re using WordPress. I’m going to go ahead and upload this from my computer, “Select Files” and I’m going to go to my “unique-wind-turbine.jpg” here.

Now I want to go ahead and put this into my post. So I’ll add this image and WordPress gives me all these options, you can’t really see these all that well because my screen has been sized for this video, but I can put it in here wherever I want. There’s a little button down here, you can’t see it, it’s just below where I’m recording, but I can go ahead and just align it to the left and I’m going to enter it into the post.

So that has now been inserted into my post and “This is a wind turbine’s inner workings.” I’m going to go ahead and click “Save” here so I can show you this and then we’re going to go ahead and publish it; you can see I clicked the “Publish” button over here on the right inside of WordPress.

I’m going to go ahead and view the post.

Now here’s the value of having done the things that we did. Number One, we’ve got the caption here, “This is a wind turbine’s inner workings;” so that’s the caption.

But if we roll over this, we have “unique-wind-turbine” is the Alt Text.

So now if I go into my post here, I can click on the image and I can change out the image title.

When I change this title, what it’s going to do is change what is called an “alt tag.” The “alt tag” stands for “alternate” or “alternate text” and what it does is it helps blind people to actually “see” what’s on your website.

It also helps search engines to “see” what the image is about.

So what you can do when you write a description is write a keyword-rich description that relates to whatever you’ve written about and that alt tag will actually help to get you search placement for the things that you are trying to get placed for. So, “Wind Turbine Inner Workings” and make you spell these right and get all the words in there because you’re really wanting to get listed for those.

But if someone is Googling “wind turbine inner workings,” I’m much more likely now to come up for this. I’m going to go ahead and update this and now, if I go over to my post and “Update Post” now that I’ve changed it. Once that’s done, I’m going to go over to the entry itself. Now if I roll over this right now, the text that pops up is “unique-wind-turbine.” Now that’s pretty good, but if I “refresh” it here, I’ve actually got now, “Wind Turbine Inner Workings” which really describes what this image is, it helps Google to know what it is and then helps blind people coming to my website to be able to access the information much more easily.

This is just one little thing that you can do when you put images on your site; edit the alt tags. If we actually look at the page code here, if we go View-Page Source and I just do a search, I can see here that my image has “wind turbine inner workings” and then the alt text – here it is: “This is a wind turbine’s inner workings.” So the title or the alt tag is what shows up when you roll over something to see what it actually is about.

Now you can also see that I’ve done this elsewhere within Green Joyment if you roll over any of these other links.

ü  Household: “Going Green at Home: Building Green Homes and Green Houses, green products for the home.”

ü  Food: “Organic gardening and organic chemistry: Green and organic recipes, organic farming and what are green foods.”

ü  Education: “Environment education and ways to protect the environment through green living.”

ü  Articles: “Environment Articles on green energy and solar energy and green living.”

I can tell this is going out of your screen a little bit, but you can get the idea here.

ü  Travel: “Travel: maps, directions and guides for cheap travel that is also green travel.”

ü  Apparel: “Green and organic clothing.”

ü  Solar Cooking: “Solar Cookers.”

So when you roll over these different things, it actually tells you what those different things are about. Those small changes that you make on your website actually help you to get search engine ranking.

In an earlier video, I showed you this code for a basic webpage. Now when you have an image, here is what the code actually looks like:

<img src=http://www.yoursite.com/images/whatever-name.jpg

This is an example of what that would look like. Now you could just close this off and that would put “whatever-name.jpg” right into wherever you put it on your website. However, you can add an alt tag or a title tag:

alt=”this is whatever”

And this is what you’ve written to describe that image; or you can put a title tag. What I normally do with images, I use an alt tag and with links, I use a title tag. So a link would look like this:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/”

Or “someone else’s site.com” or a link within your own site:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/page1.html”>

Now you could end it right there just like that; but instead, if you’ll go in and add title

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/page1.html” title=” “>

And you add something describing that page:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/page1.html” title=”this is page 1”>

And use something descriptive to talk about it, it helps Google to know what that page is about and it also helps blind people coming to your website, so you have a wider audience of people coming to look for your products and your services.

That is how title tags and alt tags work, and how you use title and alt tags on your page.

You want to make sure, even if you’re not the one doing it; you want to look at your page source and your code to know if you’re using alt tags in your images and your links.

The only other thing I want to talk about for this video … and hopefully you’ve followed all of this; if not, watch the video a couple of times. Sometimes this stuff takes a little bit to get, but I think you’ll understand it after you watch it a couple of times.

If not, post questions and give me feedback on how I can improve this.

The other thing I want to talk about in this video though is Anchor Text.

Anchor Text is where you link to something. It’s the actual text that describes whatever it is you’re linking to.

So I ended my text here with </a>; I have:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/page1.html” title=”this is page 1”></a>

Now, if I put in here “home:”

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/page1.html” title=”this is page 1”>home</a>

That’s great. But let’s say that page 1 was about “going fishing.”

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/going-fishing.html” title=”this is page 1”>home</a>

Or even more descriptive:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/going-fishing-in-denver-colorado.html” title=”this is page 1”>home</a>

The title then would be:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/going-fishing-in-denver-colorado.html” title=”Best fishing in Denver, Colorado”>home</a>

Now I could just say, “home” or “Click Here:”

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/going-fishing-in-denver-colorado.html” title=”Best fishing in Denver, Colorado”>Click Here</a>

And that’s what people would see when they tried to link or when they were looking at your page what the actual link text was. But instead, you could put “Colorado Fishing” or you could just say, “Best Fishing in Denver”

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/going-fishing-in-denver-colorado.html” title=”Best fishing in Denver, Colorado”>Best Fishing in Denver </a>

Again, this is called anchor text and what this does is it actually tells Google and also the people who looking at your website what these different things are about; what your different webpages are about.

It’s a little bit of extra work, absolutely, to make sure you have good page names and to make sure that you have title tags or alt tags and to make sure that you have good anchor text to describe what you’re linking to.

However, if you will do this, it will help; it will help a lot, to get search traffic from Google. By the way, search traffic doesn’t cost you anything and that doesn’t make it better or worse, than Pay per Click traffic; it just means that it’s free!

So if you want to get free traffic, this is one of the best ways you can get free traffic: make sure you have good title tags, good alt tags and good description tags as well as file names that actually use keywords to describe what it is that you’re talking about.

One more thing, I don’t think this is such a big deal anymore, but for a long time Google said dashes are better than underscores. All other things being equal, dashes will almost always outrank underscores.

So if you’re going to use separated page names or separated file names with multiple words in them, I would recommend using dashes instead of using underscores (even though Google is getting better at figuring out the difference between a dash and an underscore). I would make sure I used dashes when describing or using a file name with multiple words in it.

Again, I hope this video has not been confusing!

It’s probably not as clear-cut as some of the other videos I’ve done.

However, you want to make sure to watch it a couple of times to make sure you really understand the stuff, because these four concepts can really help to get a lot of traffic coming through to your website – IF you do a good job with File Names, Anchor Text, & ALT Tags.

Thank you very much for taking the time to watch the video!

Make sure you come back next Tuesday for the next Traffic Tuesday from Three Money Methods.

We’re going to talk about how to find out what people are looking for.

This will let you keyword your pages with the actual words that people are looking for in the search engines right now.

Make sure you come back next week!

Post any comments you have below the video here and look forward to seeing you at the next video from ThreeMoneyMethods.com!

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2 thoughts on “File Names, Anchor Text, & ALT Tags”

  1. Well hey there guys.

    I’ve been looking all over the internet for a GOOD black hat SEO forum.

    I was looking for some suggestions from you guys to point me in the right direction.

    Thanks a bunch, Three Money Methods is great btw.

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