What’s the problem with this, you ask? Well, no one is going to see these images in any kind of search engine. If you go plug in “title” in a google image search, you’ll get so many results that there is no hope of anyone coming to your site by searching for an image from your site. Why is it important to get more search referrals to your site? Because outside of webcomicdom, that is where sites get most of their visitors. Here, it’s the opposite. Most people visit our sites from direct links on OTHER sites. It means we get a small, in-bred audience, with few opportunities to catch a truly new reader. This is why it’s critical to improve your site’s SEO.

So here are a few tricks:

Always add titles and alts to your images. A “title” is the text you get when you hover over an image. An “alt” is alternate text, while the image is loading, or if the image does not load at all. These features are added by the following code:

<img title=”The War of Winds, an epic fantasy webcomic by KEZ” src=”/images/09_title.png” alt=”The War of Winds, an epic fantasy webcomic by KEZ”>

And in action:

You can do the same thing for links. If you hover over the rollover buttons on my main page, you will get the alternate, descriptive text. The code is a little different for adding this feature to links because one displays in IE and one displays in FF (so you want to have both!):

<a title=”epic fantasy webcomic” alt=”epic fantasy webcomic” href=”http://warofwinds.com”>The War of Winds</a>

And in action (hover to see):

The War of Winds

Simple, but worth it!  The next step is add more descriptive text into these titles and alts. You can even insert keywords only, though be aware that dropping non-relevant keywords gets you DROPPED from searches. Which brings me back to the purpose of adding titles and alts–> they are searchable even if the images and links themselves are not!