The Lost Traffic Source – Picture Posts

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Pic Posts | Response: 0

Back in the day, pic posts were all the rage, taking less time for webmasters to build for and, less time maintaining however, in recent times we seldom hear of these traffic sources as more and more webmasters turn to the TGP’s in an effort to get traffic ‘quantity’ over ‘quality’ my personal feelings are that the pic posts of the past will soon start to make a comeback.

The Basics.

So, we know the history behind the Pic Post but what about the dynamics? How exactly do they work? That’s easy, you take an image, give it a HTML page and add the recip to the PP (Pic Post) you are submitting the page / image too along with a banner leading to your site. At this time, it would be prudent to add that, if you will be submitting to PP’s on a regular basis, you might also like to add the url to your main domain on the image in the lower right or left hand corner.

One other thing to take into consideration when using PP’s is that softcore is often better. With the readily available hardcore content on TGP’s the chances are, that the surfer has decided to visit the PP because there is not as much widely available hardcore content.

Cost Balance.

In addition to the relatively minimal amount of work required to create pages for the PP’s there are several other factors that make them much better then TGP’s and Free Sites the main one is that bandwidth usage is relatively low for a start, not to mention the fact that you can knock out hundreds / thousands of PP pages a day compared to the tens / hundreds of TGP and Free Sites.

Also, when looking at cost, the one factor people often forget is the submission time and, unlike the TGP model of traffic the vast majority of PP’s will actually encourage or, in some instances, prefer automated submissions, this means that you can target hundreds of PP’s in less time than it takes to submit a TGP or Free Site.

Marketing Basics.

Of course, as with any type of site that we build as webmasters, the main reason that surfers will visit our sponsors is the marketing ‘spin’ we give them, this is where the use of Alt Tags and Text can become extremely useful, bearing in mind, the surfer can already see the ‘larger picture’ on your PP page by utilizing Alt Tags and other SEO methods you can actually entice the surfer to click through to your sponsor and, get some very good rankings in the search engines at the same time.

Housekeeping.

Now you have started to use Picture Posts, as with any form of traffic you need to ensure you keep ‘accurate’ records of who is and who isn’t accepting your pages along with details stats on the amount of traffic each PP sends you and, you ultimately send off to your sponsors site.

Adjust everything you can. trial and error plays a MAJOR part in using PP’s just because you use softcore images one day and get 1000 hits to the page you created, that doesn’t mean that by using hardcore images the next day you will receive more or, less traffic, also being niche specific, unlike with the TGP game can have its disadvantages, use images that appear at first glance, to be ‘generalized’ then, over time adjust your advertising methods to reflect the niche of surfer you are targeting.

In addition to keeping records of the pages you create for the picture posts, you should also be sure to keep a record of where else you have used them, just because you are using them for the PP’s specifically, this doesn’t mean that you can not interlink these pages together and get some traffic of your own to them, does it?

Hopefully this article has given you some more insight into the world of the Picture Post and, if you try an experiment with this little known source of quality traffic, I feel certain you will be pleasantly surprised with the results you see.

Article written by Lee

Writing Your Sales Text – Some Facts

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

Do you know the difference between writing sales text for print advertising i.e. magazines and, writing sales talk for websites?

Well some of these differences will go against your intuition however, these differences are based on how people read specific items.

Where Do Eyes Go First When Your Page Loads?

Contrary to what most webmasters think it may not always be towards the thumbnails and banners on your page instead, surfers eyes will more than likely go to the first few lines of text on the page therefore, your first chance at making a sale before the surfer starts to burn your bandwidth is to have some enticing text on any site or page you build. Another reason why learning to write good text links can benefit you long term.

Also, as most surfers will only look at a page for between three and fifteen seconds before they decide whether they want to stay on the site they are at or close it this now starts to question webmasters use of heavy graphics on their sites, if a graphic takes three to four seconds to load you have just lost valuable sales time on your site.

How Much Of Your Copy Do Users Actually Read?

On average surfers will read about 75% of the length of any given page. Again, this is good news because it now means we can draw our surfers attention tot he ‘important’ sections of our sites by using headlines and bullet points to make them stand out. Also, this means that, given surfers will read only the first 75% of any page that the bottom half of your pages may not be as important as what was first believed.

Why Do Most Banner Ads Produce Poor Click-Through Rates?

Again as with any advertising media there is only a specific time frame that anyone will look at something, in this case it has been found that the vast majority of surfer will spend a mere 1.25 seconds looking at a banner which, is about enough time to read say 5 words based on the average college students reading time of 350 words a minute.

Therefore, banners which are animated and can take up to 5 seconds to get all the information across may in effect be completely worthless on our sites. More bad news for webmasters who have fancy animations and the likes on our pages.

Why Is Reading Online More Frustrating Than Reading Print?

Did you know that reading text on a computer screen can cause your reading ability to slow by up to 25% in some cases? This means that over inflating pages with text heavy content may actually aggravate the surfer instead of draw there attention! But, how can we stop this from potentially losing us a sale? Simple here are a few suggestions.

Rather than having one long continuous stream of text have several smaller one or two line paragraphs of text.

Use headlines to summarize what you are telling the surfer for example, if you sponsor has free trials tell them in bold lettering ‘Free Trials’ you get the point across and, you may draw their attention to click on the text.

Are Your Web Page Users Not Getting The Whole Picture?

Can surfers ‘scan’ your website? Lets look back at the above figures, 75% of the page gets read, banners have an attention span of only 1.25 seconds on average, that’s not much time for a surfer to look at your pages.

I think that would probably explain the reason why surfers tend to ‘scan’ our sites and only concentrate on the free images, how many of us actually take the time to read word for word EVERYTHING on a page?

I know I hardly do I just sit there and scan the page for things that draw me into the text or site. This is true again for surfers in fact, estimated figures show that roughly 21% of surfers actually spend the time to read every single word on any site meaning the other 79% only scan through our sites this again, cuts down our marketing capabilities dramatically making it more important to have headlines and well laid out pages highlighting the part we want our surfer to look at, namely, our sponsor links.

If we do not do this we are in effect only making 21% of our marketing efforts count again, taking away from our profits. That’s a huge chunk of our surfers we are losing out on gleaming a sale from.

What do all of the above figures tell us? Simple, we need to keep our pages quick loading, concise and more importantly unique, we need to draw our surfers to the specific areas that we want them to go to first and, in the process we should start to make more money from each of our sites.

Article written by Lee

Search Engine Optimization, Is It Worth It?

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Search Engine Optimization | Response: 0

One of the trendiest takes on Internet marketing these days seems to be the notion that securing top search engine rankings “no longer works.” Where it started, I have no idea.

But rarely does a week go by when I don’t see one or more Internet marketing “experts” claiming that search engine positioning is largely a waste of time and should not be a primary focus of Website owners.

Well, as the saying goes, “there are two sides to every story.”

But let’s not make this article about my side, or your side, or anyone else’s side. Let’s forget about my opinion and other “expert’s” opinions and stick to the indisputable facts, as reported by highly credible third party sources:

According to a Forrester Research Media Field Study, getting a loyal audience in the first place is best done by Search Engine Placement.

According to a GVU Users Survey, 84.8% of Internet users use Search Engines to find Websites.

In a study released by ActivMedia Research in September 1999, Search Engine Positioning was ranked as the #1 Website promotional method used by eCommerce sites.

And look what I just found in the April 2000 issue of Target Marketing Magazine.
“Top Ways Websites are Discovered”

Banner ads: 1%

Targeted email: 1.2%

TV spots: 1.4%

“By accident”: 2.1%

Magazine ads: 4.4%

Word-of-mouth: 20%

Random Surfing: 20%

Search Engines: 46%

You’ve now seen the numbers and know that search engine promotion is very much alive and kicking. But let’s take this a step further. Let’s talk about the *quality* of prospects coming to your Website through search engines as opposed to other advertising mediums.

Every time your potential customers use the search engines, they qualify themselves as *hot prospects* by conducting searches on keywords that are directly related to your product or service. Their choice of keywords is proof that they have a genuine interest in what you offer. These people spend their valuable time exploring the search engines for your type of product or service.

Think About That.

They didn’t stumble upon one of your ads, or wander past a hyperlink to your site. And they didn’t get a banner ad thrown in their face. They made the *decision* to actively search the keywords that brought them to YOUR Website. And when they get there, they are ready and willing to do business with you. At the very least, they’re seriously considering it and, that’s the most powerful sales tool you can have!

But merely getting your Website “indexed” or listed in the search engines is not enough. In order to get any significant traffic from the search engines, your Website must be listed within the top 30 search results (preferably the top 20).

Very rarely will anyone look beyond the first 30 results returned from a search. This makes perfect sense because the most relevant sites are always listed at the top. So if your prospect doesn’t find what they want within the first 20 to 30 listings, they’ll simply do a new search.

If your site falls anywhere below the 30th listing, you don’t stand a chance against anyone in the TOP-20. Hence, it should be your goal to achieve Top 20 positions.

How Do You Get Your Website Listed In The Top 20?

1) You can attempt to gain these Top 20 rankings yourself. However, this can easily become a full time job. (I think this is why so many marketers advise against focusing on search engine positioning.)

2) You can hire a reputable company who can achieve AND maintain your Top 20 rankings for you (be sure they guarantee their service and have several verifiable clients that currently have multiple Top 20 rankings).

3) You can do nothing at all. But as you’ve seen from the third party statistics referenced above, search engine positioning is something you can’t afford to ignore.

Whatever choice you make, I hope that your eyes have been opened to the tremendous profit potential that exists with top search engine placement.

Article written by Lee

Favicon.ico – What Does It Do?

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Favicon.ico is the name of the graphic Internet Explorer 5+ uses in the address bar and when someone views their favorite bookmarks. There should be one beside the address of this page now if you are using IE5+. If you want to see favicon.ico in action among your favorites bookmark our site now by right clicking and selecting ‘Add to favorites’.

Internet Explorer looks for this file in the same directory as the HTML page currently being displayed, if it cant find favicon.ico it will then display the default Internet Explorer icon in the address bar. As for viewing of favorites, IE will check its temporary folder to see if favicon.ico is there again, if it is not located it will display the default white background with a blue ‘e’ icon.

For a webmaster there are three main advantages to using the favicon.ico ‘trick’.

The first, is that it helps to brand your site with a nice little icon that is easy to recognize.

The second, is that it makes your website more professional.

The third, is that your entry will stand out in surfers bookmarks over the others. This is especially good as, if you can get a surfer back to your site then you have another chance at making a sale.

Many internet users have a multitude of site bookmarks so, you need to use favicon.ico to give you an edge. I highly recommend using it and, now I’m going to tell you how.

First, you will need to create an icon file which is exactly 16 x 16 pixels. If the icon is larger or smaller IE5+ will just ignore it. As for the colors in it, 16 is standard. You can use more colors if you want but, the more colors you use, the larger the .ico file becomes and, the longer it takes to load.

You now know the standards the favicon.ico file has to be, now to actually create this file you can take one of two routes.

The first is to convert and existing 16 x 16 BMP or GIF graphic with 16-32 colors into an .ico file using converter software making sure to save it as favicon.ico.

You know the standards the favicon.ico file has to be, now to actually create favicon.ico . The easiest way of creating a favicon.ico file is to convert an existing 16 X 16 BMP or GIF graphic with 16 – 32 colors into a .ico file using converter software making sure to save it as favicon.ico.

Once you have created your favicon.ico file all you need to do is to upload it to any directory on your server that contains html pages. This way, when IE5+ searches for favicon.ico it will be bale to find it regardless of which page you are on.

That’s nearly all the areas of favicon.ico covers apart from, what if you want different icons for different parts of your website? Can this be done? The answer is yes it can. All you have to do is place the following HTML code between the <head> and </head> tags of your web page.

<LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”differenticon.ico”> (SHORTCUT ICON should be kept in uppercase).

Now when someone adds a web page with that code to their favorites, IE5+ will not look for favicon.ico but will look for differenticon.ico and if it’s there it will display it, if not the default icon will be displayed.

Using favicon.ico or the SHORTCUT ICON code is nice way to add a unique touch to your site, and of course will result in more repeat visitors than if you were not using it – which is always good for any webmaster.

Article Written By Le

Why Have More Than One Index Page?

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Search Engine Optimization | Response: 0

The first thing you should do when you start designing a web site is to create an index page. You would think that this is a basic knowledge in web design, but I still encounter web sites that are lacking in this.

If there’s no index page, and if the web host server has not set a directory access limitation, any visitor will see a directory listing of all the images, html pages, CGI-scripts, and other files in the directory. Everything will then be accessible for reading and downloading, and the CGI-scripts will also be executable!

So, for a basic security it is most important to have an index page in all your directories, whether they contain only pictures or garbage. In the directories that are private or containing things other then HTML pages, the index pages need only to print out a text like “access forbidden” or something in that spirit. In the directories containing one or more HTML pages, one of the pages must be named “index.html,” whether it is a page with real content or for security reason.

If you have a directory specifically for CGI-scripts, it will run a higher security risk, because most of the times these directories are called CGI-bin, or a variant of that, and anyone who is after your scripts is undoubtedly familiar with this and can access the directory by typing the directory name in the targeted site’s URL, if it’s not properly protected by an index page. Imagine the horror when someone uses your mailing list program to Spam all your subscribers or decides to sell your email list. It’s quite a big business in selling email lists. A large email list is worth thousands of US dollars nowadays.

I could have done all these things if I had any bad intentions when I accidentally bumped into an unprotected site. Actually, I bumped into two unprotected, huge subscribers lists in the last two months, which prompted me to write this article. But of course, I did the proper thing and emailed the web sites’ webmasters about their oversight. You would think that these professional looking and operating web sites with email lists of respectively 8,000 and 15,000 subscribers would know better.

Even if your site is made by a web design company, make sure all your directories are protected. In fact, one of the two unfortunate web sites I uncovered is a web design company. So, check out your site for this unnecessary security gap, right now.

Article written by Lee

Fighting Back Against Computer Viruses

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General | Response: 0

Only 10 years ago, the only way that a virus could have infected your computer was through you physically putting a floppy disk into your hard drive and running the program file that initiated the virus however, today’s viruses have become more complex in how they operate and, can spread like wild fire if they are not recognized as a virus doing damage not only to your computer but that of your associates and peers.

So how do we minimize the risk of virus infection on our computers which, lets face it, for the Adult Webmaster are our livelihood and, need to be protected at all cost. This is what we will take a brief look at in this article, how to minimize the risk of getting a computer virus and, heaven forbid, how to deal with a virus if you actually have one on your machine already.

Computer Viruses – A Little History.

1981 – The first widely accepted computer virus is recognized. The ‘Elk Cloner’ virus was spread through floppy disks and, whilst by today’s standards, it was not a high risk virus it, non the less was still a virus, in fact, all this first virus did was to display a message on your computer screen.

1991 – The ‘Tequila’ virus was the first recognized ‘polymorphic virus’ meaning, it was the first virus which actually altered its state once on your machine in order to remain undetected.

2001 – 2001 saw the spawn of several highly potent ‘worm’ orientated viruses from the ‘Gnuman’ virus, the ‘LogoLogic Worm’ and the famed (is that the right word?) ‘Nimda worm’. These ‘worms’ were the first of their kind to actually spread themselves across the World Wide Web through infecting users email clients (specifically Outlook Express) and sending itself to every email address the infected machine had in the address book.

Virus Infections – Prevention Better Than Cure.

So we now have a little background on the main viruses over the last 20 years we will take a look at the ways in which we can prevent viral infections on our computers after all, as the subtitle for this paragraph says, a prevention is far better than having to find a cure.

Here are a few simple ways you can help to prevent the spread and infection of computer viruses.

1) Install a good anti-virus software package on ALL of your computers, Norton and, Mcafee, both have some good products to aid you in preventing viral infections of your PC. Also, you should ensure the software package you do install has updated virus definitions, a new virus is created almost every week so you need to ensure your software keeps up-to-date on the latest infections.

2) Scan any and all email attachments you receive, irrespective of whether you know the sender or not, anything that you get sent in an email should be scanned, as mentioned above, there are complex viruses that can ‘send’ themselves from other peoples email address book, what happens if you are on the address book of an infected users computer? Can you afford not to be online?

3) Ensure that, once you have an Anti virus program installed on your machine that you have it setup to start each and every time that your computer boots, the first thing that should be loading on your machine is an anti-virus program, you only have one chance to prevent infection.

4) Avoid downloading .exe and .com files to your desktop unless, you know the person you are downloading the files from and, even then, before you launch or open the files ensure you scan them independently.

Virus Prevention – Overview.

Hopefully this article will have given you some insight into how you can protect both your computer and the computers of your associates and peers from computer viruses and, hopefully, by following the guidelines within this article your time spent online will be productive and virus free. One thing you should remember however is that no matter how hard we all try to remain virus free, someone will create a new program that ultimately, could infect our machines no matter how hard we try.

Article written by Lee

Adult Employment Vacancies

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Employment | Response: 0

For some the prospect of being able to work for another company online is something that they may ultimately want to pursue however, just how do you go about finding work for one of the many adult companies and, more importantly, how can you ensure that you have a better chance of being hired for the job once you find the position you would like to have at the company?

Online Adult Employment – Job Types.

Working in the adult industry can take many forms however, the most commonly perceived adult industry job is that of a model but, what about other online job vacancies such as graphics designer, marketing manager, sales director, and webmaster support representative, just how do you find out what companies are hiring and more importantly, what adult employment vacancies they have.

Adult Employment Agencies.

For many webmasters the chances of finding employment in the adult industry at a ‘regular’ online employment agency such as monster.com may seem impossible however, that said, many of the larger companies have realized the value of the mainstream employment agencies and, as such are now advertising on these sites for their staff but where else can you look? Well there are actually several adult industry employment sites that adult webmasters can look at to find their ideal job for example Adult Staffing, Sexy Jobs and, Adult Help Wanted in addition to several smaller sites operated by companies such as Cybererotica.

Improving Your Employment Chances.

So now you know where to look for adult employment opportunities what can you do to ensure you have a greater chance of being hired? Well as with the mainstream bricks and mortar job market having a good curriculum vitae (CV) can be a good start, ensure you keep your CV regularly updated and that it contains pertinent information for the type of job vacancy you are looking for in addition, often the first method of contact you will make with these potential employers will be via email or cover letter, make sure that you spend some time to write a letter that is not only noticeable but, interesting and, more importantly, grammatically correct. Demonstrate in this first stage of contact with your potential future adult employer that you take pride in your work and, you might just get bumped to the top of the ‘must see’ applicants.

Adult Jobs – Overview.

Many webmasters forget that there is more to the online adult industry than being able to party with the best of us and, whilst this does form a chunk of the industry overall it is not conducive of you further enhancing your online career, take the time to investigate all of the avenues available to you and, most importantly, make sure you choose a job that you not only want to do but one that you will enjoy, your reputation is the one thing that a potential adult employer will take into consideration, if you have had several previous jobs all lasting for short periods of time, it wont look as good to them as if you have only had a couple of jobs for a lengthier time frame. Most of all remember that whenever you contact a company looking for employers, make sure you are prepared and professional even if it is just sending them a quick email asking for further information.

Article written by Lee.

Maximizing Your Profit Potential – Upsells

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Sponsors | Response: 0

We all know the reason why pay sites have upsells inside them, to make more money so, the past few weeks I have been ‘experimenting’ with the same type of strategy the pay sites use and, to my surprise, actually found out you can make quite a nice amount of additional income by offering your surfers products or services other than porn!

Now, this may come as a shock to many but, when you build a free site, TGP Gallery, AVS site etc you can use non adult products on them.

I have found the following work well for the various different types of site:

Free Sites.

Dating Services such as http://www.oscardate.com , http://www.adultfriendfinder.com, etc etc.

Video Stores such as http://www.mallcom.com and http://www.moviemountain.com.

Sex Toys such as http://www.gayadultshopping.com and http://www.mallcom.com (Mallcom sells toys and videos)

Also, to my surprise, search engines have done really well on our traffic. Where we would usually use a text link I SSI’d some files and included some text files going directly to a variety of niches earning me in excess of $0.40 per click in some instances!!

AVS Sites.

Dating Services like those mentioned above e have found have done reasonably well however, for some reason not as well as they did on the free sites, you would think that they should do better than on free sites so I guess it is something wrong with my marketing, either way, we just plugged a link to one of our dating affiliates and, sure enough made some $$$ from them.

Penis Enlargement programs did VERY well inside our AVS sites again, all we did was place a simple text link with ‘enlarge your penis’ for the text and, surprisingly we made a few good sales from that.

We also integrated our own little MallCom store front on its own domain and have been sending traffic to that and, again, the results have been reasonable.

TGP Galleries.

To my surprise, the most profitable thing that we have tested on our TGP Galleries is again, Penis Enlargement type programs, Viagra sales from http://www.kwikmed.com have been doing well the last few weeks and we even had a rebill already!

One thing that I didn’t expect to work well that did was email collection, in fact, after just 10 days we already have 95 email addresses purely from our TGP Galleries. These emails will be used further in time to send out our newsletter and hopefully make some recurring sales from them.

I guess the point of this was to let you know you can use alternatives to your adult orientated sponsors on any type of site you build and make a profit from them.

Anyway, I’m off to do some more testing, I have found a nice casino sponsor imp going to send a few days of traffic to.

Article written by Lee

Undeveloped Domains – Put Them To Use

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Domain Names | Response: 0

Often when searching for new domain names, i come across what should, in theory be a golden opportunity only to find, the domain itself has already been registered and, whilst this in itself is annoying, what is even more annoying is that the domain 404’s when typed into the browser window.

The mere fact that someone else, a webmaster no less, has thought about purchasing the same domain as what you may have means there is already value in that domain and, more importantly, you have potentially lost a sale.

So how can we capitalize on this potential lost traffic from the off-set? That is what we will look at in this brief article.

The first thing we need to do in order to start making some additional potential profit from our domain is to create a ‘generic’ holding page until such time that we have the time or, funding, to develop the site we had intended to place on our new domain name.

This holding page can take many forms depending on the type of traffic you are hoping to target with the domain itself. Ideally, you will want to have as much choice for the surfer (or webmaster) on this holding page as you can so, you need to assess the nest types of sites to use, the best use of the traffic no matter how small it could be and, more importantly, the best way to maximize your sales potential.

One good way of doing this is to split the page into three sections, two equal sized sections at the top portion of the page and, one smaller portion towards the very base of the page designed, almost like a footer.

In the two top portions you should equally distribute both surfer orientated and, webmaster orientated links both of which need to be clearly separated.

For example, the left side of the page take all of your top converting paysites and list them by niche, they don’t have to have fancy or heavy graphics, text links will suffice for now as this is only a ‘temporary’ page.

On the right hand side of the page place some of your webmaster referral linking codes with a brief description, remembering that not only surfers could hit this page but webmasters themselves.

On the ‘footer’ portion of the page, the most important section, you should put your contact details, ideally an email address and, if the domain warrants, details of how you can be reached by instant messenger. The reason for the email and instant messenger details is a simple one, if a webmaster REALLY wants the domain that you have, he, or she, might just make you an offer on it and, if they have no way to get in touch with you then, you have just lost an offer on a domain that you might not get around to using for months.

of course, in addition to utilizing the traffic you have on the domain you can also use this holding page to generate more traffic, for example, placing a banner or button exchange code on the site or, perhaps a counter. The possibilities to generate traffic to these pages are limitless depending on how you use the holding page itself.

Well, that’s the basics of domain holding pages explained and, hopefully you will have realized that no matter what you plan on doing with your new domains, after your host has added them to your server, the next thing you should do is to create a generic holding page that you can upload into the rot of the domain name and, who knows, you might end up making some money a little sooner from that unused domain name.

Article written by Lee

How To Use ALT Tags On Your Sites

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

One simple technique can improve your search engine rank, make site navigation easier, and increase the accessibility of your site to disabled visitors. Yet, as many as 78% of sites don’t use it! Boost your site’s profile with human visitors and search engine spiders with the <ALT> tag.

Inserting ALT Text

Adding <ALT> descriptions to your <IMG> tags is quick and easy. You don’t have to do any complex HTML coding. If you can describe your image or link, then you can add ALT tags to your code.

We’ve used some examples below:

<img src="thumbnails/porn.jpg" 
  width="100" height="78" ALT="Explicit Teenage Sex Pictures">

You can also include an ALT tag when your image is a link:

<a href="porn.html"> 
<img src="thumbnails/porn.jpg" 
width="100" height="78" ALT="Explicit Teenage Sex Pictures"></a>

Ideally, your ALT text descriptions should be complete sentences, rather than a list of keywords or obscure phrase like “company logo small 2.” Remember that all visitors are likely to see (or hear) some version of your ALT text so be sure that it’s meaningful.

Optimize ALT Descriptions For Search Engines

Besides helping human visitors, ALT descriptions help you rank higher in some search engines. AltaVista and Google are two of the search engines that use ALT descriptive text when they rank Web sites. The growth of search engine/directory partnerships means that a high rank in one engine can often translate into an improved rank on its partner sites.

Search engine algorithms calculate the number of times keywords are repeated and give higher rank to pages that use them often. Keywords in the ALT descriptive text help you increase their frequency on the page. Search engines assume the terms are more relevant and important if they’re used in the page content, not just listed in the META tag.

For instance, the descriptive text in the example code uses keywords and keyword phrases from the META keyword tag: Explicit Teenage Sex Pictures. Since these are relevant to the site’s content, they’re easy to include as descriptive text.

If you’re having problems choosing relevant, targeted keywords, refer to this article, How To Pick Your Keywords. It provides helpful tips about selecting keywords and using them to improve your search engine ranking.

Make Your Web Site Sticky

ALT tags help you promote your site in another way too: they help make it “sticky.” Sticky means that visitors stay at your site longer so they see your advertising and purchase your memberships. Visitors who feel comfortable at a site will stay longer – and hopefully return more often to make further purchases.

Disabled visitors who use text-only or spoken word browsers rely on the ALT text for clues about the image’s content and function. This can be a lucrative audience: they represent a worldwide audience of 750 million and spend twice as much time online as the average user. But it isn’t just a disability issue: ALT tags make your site more accessible to everyone.

Visitors see your ALT text while the images are downloading or when they mouse over images. The descriptive text helps them decide if they want to wait for an image to download or move on to a different page. If your image is also a link, then visitors can read the explanatory text and quickly jump to the section they want.

Site navigation is easier, so impatient visitors are less likely to leave the site.

Don’t Follow The Crowd

ALT tags are a small addition to your HTML code that can make a big impact on your site. Since many of your competitors don’t use them, give your site and edge and include them on all images.

Article Written By Lee