You will be able to use internal links, image alt text and readable URLs to help Google find and understand pages.
Priya's new P5 page is written, with a clear title and a sensible heading structure. She publishes it and waits. Two weeks later it is still missing from her site: search. When she looks at her own site as a visitor, she sees why. The page is not in the menu, no other page mentions it, and the only way to reach it is to type its address. As far as anyone browsing the site can tell, it does not exist, and Googlebot is in the same position.
This lesson covers three small things that make a big difference to whether a page is found and understood: the links between your own pages, the text that describes your images, and the page addresses themselves.
An internal link is a link from one page on your site to another. Lesson 1.1 explained that Googlebot discovers pages mainly by following links. Internal links are the links you control completely, so they are the first place to make sure every important page can be reached.
Google also uses links to understand pages. The clickable text of a link, called the anchor text, tells both readers and Google what the linked page is about. Google's link best practices ask for anchor text that is descriptive and reasonably concise, and that makes sense out of context. "Click here" or "read more" tells nobody anything. "See our P5 maths class timetable" tells a parent and Google exactly where the link goes.
Think about where a reader would naturally want to go next. Priya's homepage, which targets the broad cluster "maths tuition Tampines", should link to the P5 page with words like "P5 maths classes". Her blog post on problem sum mistakes should link to the P5 page where it mentions how her classes deal with them. Her P6 page might link to the P5 page for parents of younger siblings. Each of those links helps a reader and tells Google how the pages relate.
A sitemap, covered in lesson 4.2, Sitemaps and getting new pages found, tells Google a page exists. It does not tell Google or anyone else that the page matters. Pages that are only in a sitemap, with no links from the rest of the site, are sometimes called orphan pages, and Google has fewer clues about their importance and topic.
Your most important pages should be reachable from the main menu or from closely related pages, ideally within a click or two of the homepage. If a page appears in your keyword map as a priority, check that real links lead to it. Footer links count too, but a link inside the text of a related page usually carries more meaning, because the words around it describe the destination.
Every image on a web page can carry a short text description called alt text. It exists first for people who cannot see the image, such as people using screen readers, and it is read aloud in place of the picture. Google also uses alt text, along with the text around an image, to understand what the image shows.
Good alt text describes the image accurately and briefly, in the context of the page. For a photo in Priya's "How a class runs" section, "Four P5 pupils working through a ratio problem with a teacher at the Tampines centre" is useful. "Maths tuition Tampines best maths tuition P5" is keyword stuffing, and a screen reader user would hear every word of it. Purely decorative images, such as a background pattern, can have empty alt text so screen readers skip them.
Most website builders have an alt text field in the image settings. It takes a minute per image and is one of the most commonly skipped fields on small business sites.
A URL is the page's address. Google's guidance suggests a simple URL structure that people can understand, using words rather than long strings of numbers and symbols. An address such as /tuition/primary-maths or /p5-maths-tuition-tampines tells someone what to expect before they click. An address such as /page?id=4821&cat=7 tells them nothing.
Use hyphens between words. Keep addresses short and in lowercase. If your website builder created your pages with messy addresses, do not rush to change them all. Changing a URL means setting up a redirect from the old one, which lesson 4.4, Moves, redirects and broken pages, covers. For new pages, choose a readable address from the start, as Priya did with /p5-maths-tuition-tampines.
For Priya, the fix took twenty minutes. She added the P5 page to her main menu under "Classes", added descriptive links to it from her homepage, her P6 page and two blog posts, and wrote alt text for the four photos on the page. The address was already readable, because she had chosen it when she created the page.
Do the same for each priority page on your keyword map. Find three places on your site where a reader would naturally want to reach that page, and write the link in words that describe it. The activity below asks for those links and for alt text on the page's main images.
Add or fix three internal links pointing to each priority page, with descriptive anchor text, and write alt text for its main images.
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