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Collection: 51_crawl

this data is currently not publicly accessible.

Company: FedEx

Search Engine Optimization Mistakes:

1) Repeated keywords in ALT tags

An ALT tag is an HTML tag used to provide alternative text for non-textual elements of a webpage (usually images). ALT tags appear on a page when images cannot be displayed. This tag is used to describe the image and provide more information about image.

ALT tags are important for the following reasons:

1. Visitors with slow connections are able to see ALT tags when the image is loading.
2. Visitors with internet browsers that do not support image downloading or with images turned off will able to see image descriptions.   
3. Many visually impaired visitors have browsers that read ALT tags aloud so they can surf the web.

Search engine crawlers are not able index an image (they can’t see pictures) so crawlers use ALT tags to collect a description of the image. This description is stored in a text cache of the webpage and search engines use this indexed text to provide search results.

The webpage at the top-right has a nice and simple design. The screen shot below shows how the same page looks in Google’s cache.

The screen shot below shows the cached text of this page in Google. You can see a list of keywords that all of a sudden appears in cache.

Take a look at HTML code of this page below. There are a number of 1 pixel images with repeated keywords stuffed into the ALT tags.

For example:

<IMG height=1 alt="FedEx, Federal Express, transportation services, overnight shipping, international shipping, freight forwarding, cargo, same day shipping services" src="http://images.fedex.com/images/ascend/shared/shared_dot_clear.gif" width=15 border=0>

So we have identified that FedEx is stuffing keywords into their ALT tags.  Why would they do this?  Well a large part of how Google and the other major search engines rank websites is based on the keywords on the page.  Relevance is partly determined by the number of times and ratio of keywords to total words.  FedEx doesn’t want to muddy up their nice simple design, so they hide the keywords where regular surfers won’t see them. 

Google considers this type of technique spam and they don’t recommend using it. 

What should be done?
Delete the 1 pixel images with spam in ALT tags.

Comments:
Do not use stuff keywords in ALT tags because search engines can easily recognize this as spam. So if they know it's a trick, the benefit is discounted, and the reason for doing it is eliminated.

It's an old trick that used to work many years ago - and when you see a large corporate website trying techniques like this, it reinforces the importance of hiring a reputable SEO firm with a good reputation.