ALT tags

How effective have you found alt tags to be? Whats the best tags to put on them - keywords for the site or descriptions of the images

I don't know how useful the alt tags are. I do know that the major search engines are surpose to use them in helping them to rank sites.

I didn't use them in the past, but I then started to use them and I found no major change in my sites ranking.

The W3C standard is to use the Alt attribute with images. To the best of my recollection, it's the only time you should use "Alt". I don't believe it is valid with any other element. The primary purpose of the Alt attribute is for text browsers or browsers with images disabled. I've never seen anywhere that search engines even care about it. The Alt attribute provides a "tool tip" when moused-over, and is also displayed in text browsers and browsers where images are disabled.

//added note for educational purposes. "Alt" is a valid attribute of the "img" element. The generic term "tag" is generally used to refer to HTML elements (e.g. "img" is an HTML element; "alt" is an HTML attribute). When refering to attributes that can be validly used to define the behavior of an element, they should be refered to as attributes, not the term "tags".

I've seen some evidence that Google indexes alt text associated with images that appear within links. An example is this page that has two different images with unique words inside the alt attribute. If you search Google for the first word you'll only get some forum page that refers to the test and contain the nonsense word, but if you search for the word in the alt attribute of the image link you'll get both the forum pages about the test page and the page itself. The nonsense word also appears in Google's description of the page. To me that seems to be an indication that Google does index alt text if it is an attribute of an image inside a link.

I'm not suggesting abusing this or distorting the purpose of the alt attribute, I just thought it was interesting.

Interesting RichB -- that's an excellent link and good to know. First I've seen something like that. Combine my tip with your tip and people could enhance their site. Great research. I've included "alt" for years, but nice to see it works in your favor.

I have heard peoply discuss alt tags on text links before.

I have also seen it mentioned on many of the other forums on the Web!

Also,
Some search engines, including Google have image searches. May be useful to you or maybe not. Having a good alt tag that tells what the picture is sometimes helps get that picture listed. Of course though, very few people use the image search.

I would imagin that the people that mainly use the images search on Google are students and designers

Actually, for text links it should be the "title" attribute, not "alt" (essentially it does the same thing re: the tool tip).

Not necessarily so. If you can forget for a moment that I design, I also garden as a hobby. I find myself looking more for images of flowers than I do for images for design ideas. In fact it's almost always for flowers and in some cases animals.

Then again, I guess your right as people who are interested in cars will use it to see car images, people internested in football may also use it, etc.

Another words, anybody could use it!

SEO note for both the "alt" tag for iamges and the "title" attribute for text links.

First alt tags: Google will spider the text in image links "only" placing text in a non link image will not get consideration.

Important considerations: Is the destination of your link more important than the page that the image link is on? If so use the keyword for the destination, not the page linking.

For example if I were linking to my page optimized for "seo company" with an image my alt text would be "seo company" even if the page I was linking from was my page for "seo expert" as "seo expert" is a far less competitive term.

A thing to remember is try to keep the alt short and relevant to the image ie: If your page is about the kw "car" then your alt should be "car image" or better yet just "car"

The worst thing you can do is attempt to overload the alt with tons of kw's this not only dilutes the density proportionately it ends up covering your image on mouseover and making your site look like crap.

For optimization purposes if your going to kw load a link an html version with choice anchor text is preferred.

Now for the title attribute. It does nothing for your ranks (Trust me I've tested it) http://www.seo-tests.com/title-attribute.html

It is used for browsers enabled with special attribute reading feature for the visually impaired but lends no wait to ranking in the Google algorithm or as far as I can tell any other engine

Cheers

I think it is save to say that the various search engines are unique. You should focus your efforts on using all available methods; rather than invest so much time getting inside the brains of the search engine powers that be.

Don't get me wrong... this is an interesting thread. However, it may not necessarily be all that beneficial.

What is interesting are the creative methods web masters user to get text into alt and title attributes, and meta tags with minimum fuss. Furthermore, I'd like to know how much effort you place on word forms and synonyms.

rjmthezonenet
When it comes to relevancy based search there are 2 powering engines PERIOD! Google and Ink

Thankfully optimization for them can be quite similar so you can rank well for both for instance I rank #1 for SEO Company in both inktomi and Google. Which covers Google, MSN, AOL, HOTBOT and any other engine that brings traffic so I say this discussion is VERY beneficial.

Your word forms and synonyms question is much more interesting and the answer for myself is I emphasise synonyms as much as both the traffic amount available tells me too. Also interesting is the both main powering engines utilize a technique known as keyword stemming which covers derivatives and plurals. Smoke becomes smoking becomes smoker with no onpage change