Well, actually, the headline of that article is almost correct, but by accident. It was not the ancient Egyptians who considered aloe a symbol of vitality, but the Egyptians of 1825, according to an Orientalist named Edward William Lane who visited the city of Cairo in that year. He wrote:
It is a very common custom in Cairo to hang an aloe plant over the
door of a house particularly over that of a new house; or over a door
newly built: and this is regarded as a charm to insure long and
flourishing lives to the inmates and long continuance to the house
itself. (source)
It appears that through some kind of slow osmosis this turned into a myth about the "plant of immortality" in New Age pamphlets sometime around the 1970s or 1980s.
The ancient Egyptians had no special interest in aloe, as we learn from the popular book Aloe - Myth, Magic, Medicine: Aloe Vera Across Time (Universal Graphics, 1989):
While the Papyrus Ebers gives only general directions for preparation of the leaf (such as grind up and pulverize), it plainly states that Aloe was mixed with other substances such as frankincense, myrrh, honey, juniper berry, mint, unknown green leaves, deerhorn, and others. (p. 63)
In fact, I cannot find any evidence that we even know their word for aloe. I think this book's claim is based on a 1930 "translation" of the Papyrus Ebers by Cyril P. Byran, but that work seems to be considered highly suspect; it's a "'rendition into English of German and other translations of the Egyptian original,' is fragmentary, and is full of satiric editorial comment."
John F. Nunn's seminal work Ancient Egyptian Medicine does not contain an entry for aloe in his table of herbs with "considerable agreement for the meaning of the Egyptian word," nor does it show up in E.A. Wallis Budge's dictionary of hieroglyphics. "Aloe" does not show up in the translation of the Edwin Smith surgical papyrus, and as above, its use in an early English translation of the Ebers papyrus was spurious.
