The Importance of Using Alt Tags

This entry was originally posted on the omnistaretools.com blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

Using alt tags on images is an important aspect of web design, for accessibility reasons. When designing a site, you should always take alt tags into account, simply because to not do so is to alienate an entire section of your audience.

Accessibility

It is sometimes hard to remember that a significant number of web users will interact with your site using something other than a normal configuration. Blind users often have software that will read out alt text in lieu of showing images; mobile viewers may not be able to view large images, and will instead browse your site according to alt tags; dial-up browsers generally turn off images when browsing unfamiliar sites, just to speed up surfing speed; high-tech users may be using a lynx browser to view your site; and e-mail clients almost always have images turned off as default. In each of these circumstances, the viewer will not see the images you put on your site, but just the alt text. Ignoring alt text would be to ignore the experience of these potential prospects on your site.

Thankfully, there is an easy way of fixing this. When placing an image on your site, just always remember to put in alt text describing what the image is, or what the image is for. That’s it. That’s the fix in its entirety.

(If you want to get technical for a moment, what this means is whenever you place a picture up (), just add in an alt description, as so: . Of course, in reality you should also be putting in height and width attributes, but that’s a topic for a future article.)

That said, I need to also talk about the part of alt tags that I’ve been consciously omitting until now: alt tags in SEO.

Search engine optimization through alt tags?

In the past, alt tags were used in black hat SEO by stuffing in keywords that could not be seen by normal users into the alt tags. Back then, this was one of a number of techniques used to hide keywords from users while showing them to spiders indexing your site. Instead of a response to this misuse coming from search engines directly, browsers fought back by showing this text to ordinary viewers whenever a user hovered the mouse pointer over the image. But that all changed a couple of years back, when all the major search engines simultaneously decided to revise their ranking algorithms to specifically ignore all alt text content.

I’m going to repeat that to make sure it’s fully understood: Search engines do NOT consider alt text when determining your ranking. This means that keyword-stuffing your alt text is completely pointless. It does nothing to help you, and it does nothing to hurt you, in SEO terms. If all the web were just SEO, then I’d say to just forget about alt tags completely. But accessibility is also important, as if your site is accessible when your competitors’ are not, then that means you’ll get every sale that they lose due to their accessibility. And this is just as important, if not more so, than SEO.

Plus, who’s to say that next year search engines won’t start taking alt tags into consideration again?

A final related tip before I sign off for the day: consider using a description of your graphics beneath each picture. Research has shown that not only do prominent pictures receive a good percentage of users’ attention when they arrive on your site, but also any text right below that image, so long as it is clearly differentiable from the main content of the site (in italics, or small and bold). If you try this, do not eliminate alt text from the picture; but also try not to make the alt text a direct copy of the text below it. Use alt text to further describe the image, whenever possible.

And I really shouldn’t have to say this, but if you use an image that is not meant to be seen by the user (such as a whitespace image or similar), then do not enter in an alt tag. Nothing is more irritating to a blind websurfer than when every bulleted point starts off with the computer reading out “bullet point” in a robotic voice. Well… almost nothing. I guess webmasters who put white text on a white background filled with keywords is more irritating. But not by much, since you can generally just skip over paragraphs full of keywords, but if you want to hear each bullet point, then you’re pretty much forced to hear every instance of “bullet point” spoken aloud.

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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Starting to Think About Ron Paul

I've been avoiding talking about Ron Paul for a while now. But I don't think I can continue without saying a few things.

There's something about this Ron Paul guy.

And I'm not just talking about the fact that he is currently third in raising funds. I'm not just talking about the fact that he wins straw polls left and right, often by a huge margin. (81% in my home state of Alabama (2nd place was 5%), and 28% in my current state of Maryland (2nd place was 24%), to name just two examples).
I guess what I'm talking about is the fact that his message seems to resonate with so many people.



Let me say up front that I am a Mike Gravel supporter. But I want to give an honest rundown of Ron Paul, so that everyone can see what I see whenever I hear about him, which seems to happen more and more often lately.


The one thing that shines through about Ron Paul is his sincerity. He has very strong opinions, and his votes on the hill never deviate from them. One thing that he is very strong about is his absolute refusal to vote on any measure that he believes the constitution does not authorize the congress to oversee, even if he is in fact in favor of hatever that measure is trying to address. The man is a constitutionalist, through and through, and he has stood up against special interests and lobbyists of all kinds throughout his tenure. In fact, it is so well known that he remains true to his core beliefs that few lobbyists even bothered to try with him, at least up until his presidential campaign got up to speed.
Many times, looking at congressional voting records is difficult, as there are almost always extenuating circumstances with different bills. But not so with Ron Paul; his voting record is clean as the driven snow.
He has NEVER:

• voted to raise taxes
• voted for a budget that wasn't balanced
• voted to raise congressional pay
• voted for a bill that he believed was contrary to the constution, including any and all bills restricting gun ownership of any kind, and any bill that would have granted the executive power additional powers

• In addition, he voted against the Patriot Act.
• He voted against regulating the internet.
• He voted against the Iraq war.

Furthermore, he refuses to accept anything more than a minimal salary; he does not participate in the congressional pension plan, and he returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the US treasury every year.
Furthermore, he is one of the most active congressmen I've ever seen. When compared to any other single member of congress, he has introduced the most pieces of legislation, though to be honest, not many are able to get through, due to his unwillingness to work 'behind the scenes' and participate in quid pro quo policies.

In short, Ron Paul is honest, decent, and truthfully believes in his convictions. It is rare to see such a person running for President. It is even rarer to see them actually starting to do really well, as Dr. Paul is.




His foriegn policy is very similar to Mike Gravel's. He wants to pull our troops out, not just from Iraq, but from most everywhere else, too. To quote Mike Gravel on a point that Ron Paul agreed with: "Policing the world is just their way of enforcing our American empire."
Ron Paul's ideas on free trade are quite confusing. He is libertarian, yet... Ron Paul believes that free trade deals and world governmental trade organizations like ICC, NAFTA, GATT, WTO, and CAFTA are bad for our nation. To quote Dr. Paul: "We must withdraw from any organizations and trade deals that infringe upon the freedom and independence of the United States of America."
Ron Paul also strongly believes in privacy, even though he does not agree that constitution has a privacy clause in it. He's against a national ID card, against the use of a social security number in the private sector (he wants it to be gov't only), against letting medical insurance companies see your medical info, against the current US law that notifies the US gov't wheneveryou deposit $10k or more into a bank, etc.
He is also strongly against birthright citizenship. "As long as illegal immigrants know their children born here will be citizens, the incentive to enter the U.S. illegally will remain strong." And Dr. Paul believes that removing incentives is the only way to properly enforce laws.
He is for what he calls 'health freedom', which he describes is your ability to take care ofyour health the way you best see fit. This includes a move against the FDA, possibly to the point of shutting them down, and an opposition of any bill that would require US citizens to be immunized from any disease, such as the recent HR 5005 that authorized the forced vaccination of American citizens against small pox.
He is very strongly pro-life, as he was a practicing medical doctor for many years, and delivered many babies himself.
He is even more stringently against taxation, wanting to minimize taxes to the extreme. He wants to abolish the IRS and replace it with NOTHING. He points out that the loss of income tax will bring our national income level to about where it was in 2000. He thinks that cutting spending to that level shouldn't be that difficult. He also wants to start backing every dollar with something physical, so that the US gov't has to stop taking loans out by printing more money. He is an extreme fiscal conservative.
He wants to eliminate social security for all younger people, and yet still pay out top dollar to those depending on it, as well as actually increasing what they receive, because he believes that all taxes on social security income should be immediately repealed. This would be paid for by reducing the military.


I could go on and on. But you get the idea. His issues are pretty straightforward, and he believes in them all fairly strongly.


There are a number of things that I disagree with. But the weird part is... If he were president, most of this stuff he'd never be able to implement. And the stuff that he would be able to implement is stuff I basically agree with.
So, in a weird way, I almost wouldn't mind if he were president.



Please don't get me wrong; I support Mike Gravel. And I think removing the FDA is just as ludicrous as his consistent voting record to allow citizens to legally handle submachine guns. But I have to hand to it to him that at least he's consistent. And when you think about it, only congress has the authority to deal with gun legislation. Only congress has the authority to deal with birthright citizenship. Only congress has the authority to back the dollar. And since Ron Paul is so sincere, I cannot imagine that he would use the executive branch to subvert his own ideals in order to bring those policies into place. No, if he were president, these insane ideas that I wholeheartedly think are stupid would never come into play at all.
On the other hand, everything that I do agree with is stuff that he would then have authority to start realizing: foreign policy, trade agreements, int'l organizations, etc. The only thing, in fact, that he would have power over that I don't immediately like is the possibility of his appointing new supreme court justices. But Ron Paul seems so honest... I can't imagine him appointing anyone that wasn't a strict conservative constitutionalist. And those types of people would never repeal earlier decisions by their own court without overriding need, and so they would not vote to overturn Roe v Wade, for example.


So with Mike Gravel getting beaten back left and right, and with Dennis Kucinich saying incredibly stupid things like "I saw a UFO" on live national television, I'm really starting to think hard about Ron Paul.
And I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet.

Kucinich: "I saw a UFO."

Kucinich: "I saw a UFO."
.:sigh:. Look: I'm for Mike Gravel, and I back him 95%. But if he doesn't make it, the only choice I have left is Dennis Kucinich. So it really irks me that he's so idiotic as to say something like this during the democratic presidential debate.
Why can't truly intelligent people ever make it in US politics? Why is it that of all the contenders that are left (if Gravel's run is over), the last person I feel capable of voting for is someone who claims to have seen a UFO?
I really want to move to another country. )c:

Watch Gravel at NBC Presidential Debate

Mike Gravel, who was banned from the tonight's democratic presidential debate by NBC is going to answer all the debate questions from across the street, and broadcast this live on the web at Gravel2008.us.
If you plan to watch tonight's debate, then you should also watch Gravel's webcast! If we let GE and its subsidiary, NBC, dictate who is and who is not allowed to become president, then it is not Mike Gravel that loses out, but all of democracy itself! How can we claim to have a free society when this kind of thing occurs, and no one acts to stop it? Why are we not revolting in the streets right now, as they would be doing in any respectable developing country? We cannot--we dare not allow the giant news corporations to dictate to us who is allowed airtime on these presidential debates! If we want to call ourselves free, then we must push for freedom!
Watch the debate live tonight, at Gravel2008.us! (6pm pst/9pm est)
Update: Now that the debate is over, here's the video of the event. Be aware that the audio was messed up in the first two minutes, but it quickly clears up.
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What is Digg?

This entry was originally posted on the omnistaretools.com blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

Web 2.0 is all about socialization. Whereas media may have ruled in the 1.0 era, now that 2.0 is here, social media gets all the attention. Even the old guard has brought web 2.0 to their sites: major newspapers like the New York Times and The Guardian have blog comments/forums where users can give feedback, and major television news corporations like Fox News actively requests and airs user generated content, such as video of the recent California fires, or quick comments sent off to The O’Reilly Factor.

But the newest Web 2.0 trend is social bookmarking. Whereas in the old web 1.0 days, setting a bookmark meant using your browser to list a site as your favorite, and then finding that link again meant you had to go back to that same browser on that same computer, now setting a bookmark on your social bookmarking site of choice creates an online link that is not only for your reference, but is open to the public at large to see what you found that was interesting enough to bookmark.

Web 2.0 bookmarks are shared among thousands of viewers, and something as simple as setting a bookmark can now mean that that site will receive thousands of hits within the space of a few days.

What is Digg?

The most popular social bookmarking site by far is Digg. Ostensibly a bookmarking site that’s concentrated on technology news, in reality, Digg is the bookmarking site of choice for the masses. If it’s popular on the web, then you can bet it’s either already on Digg or else it was made popular well beforeDigg‘s occurrence on the scene in 2004.

Digg works like this: someone finds a website or page they find interesting, and they submit it on Digg. Then others browsing Digg see the submission, and, if they also think it is interesting, they bookmark it as well. On Digg, the act of bookmarking is called ‘digging’, and when a site has a number of people who have bookmarked it, then one says that it has been ‘dugg’ that many times.

This is important for you as a webmaster, because when you put up useful content, it is always good to find some way of getting that content to be seen by many viewers. By making it easy for content on your site to be dugg, then you will start to get a lot of new visitors that you otherwise would not otherwise have had. It should be mentioned that, by far, the majority of these visitors will not be high quality leads, but the sheer number of visits you may receive from a popular article on Digg will certainly drive a number of conversions.

When putting up new content, try placing a button next to your article that allows readers to submit to digg.com in a single click. (Some example buttons for this use are available at Digg.com.) If you want, you might try submitting your own articles to get started, but make sure that you only do this for articles that you feel are high-quality enough to not be interpreted as spam. Make sure that when you submit your article, you put in a good description and place it in the correct category; once submitted, these options cannot be modified.

A few caveats…

Having said all of this, I want to make sure that everyone understands that the real reason why digg is useful is for SEO. It is in getting a pagerank 7 or 8 link to your content that Digg really shines. Yes, a popular story may get you more visits in one day than your site usually gets in six months. But these visits are usually by people browsing the general archive, and are not high-quality visitors. Their conversion rate will be far less than what you normally receive. Nevertheless, the high pagerank link makes it all worth it.

A final caveat is that you should remember that each webpage has its own pagerank–your site as a whole does not share pagerank with itself, though if you do extensive internal linking, it will always help. Thus when you get a story dugg, remember that the url of the page that is dugg is the only page on your site to gain that high pagerank link. Nevertheless, do not try digging the main page of your site until you feel truly comfortable with the system, as editing the digg links once posted are impossible, and the system does not allow multiple links to the same url.

Hopefully, this information has gotten you up to speed on at least one web 2.0 site that can help your SEO. In future articles, I will be covering many more.

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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