ALT Tag
Don’t even think of using the ALT attribute (often called the alt-tag) any other way than outlined in the W3C Accessibility Guidelines - 7.1 Short text equivalents for images.
The alt-tag is there for the many users who use talking browsers, screen readers, text browsers or browsers on small devices. If you are blind the last thing you want to hear from your talking browser is the text in an alt tag stuffed with keywords.
Use short and clear alternative text for every image that carries information and use alt=”" (nothing between the quotes) for non-link images that do not convey information or are redundant.
Remember search engine spiders are ‘blind’ too and if you write perfect alt text for a blind user it will be perfect for SEO as well.
alt=”store fixtures and retail store fixtures with fixtures in the store” (Let Google know you are an alt tag spammer)
alt=”Chris Day” (Bad)
alt=”Chris Day at work” (Better)
alt=”Google engineer Chris Day seated at his workstation.” (Perfect!)
kirtan said,
September 13, 2006 @ 7:00 am
Some Search engine optmization tools recommends to have keywords in first 3 alt attributes. can you explain more about this? please?
duz said,
September 13, 2006 @ 8:03 am
Forcing keywords into the alt tag is a waste of time. The alt tag is for users of talking browsers, screen readers, text browsers or browsers on small devices. As I said above “…if you write perfect alt text for a blind user it will be perfect for SEO as well”. If it happens to (naturally) include your keywords for that page that’s fine, if it doesn’t that’s fine too.
weikelbob said,
December 23, 2006 @ 9:45 pm
Alt tags are seem to be a widely misunderstood area of SEO, since many big SEO companies insist on putting keywords in alt tags.
If someone asks, how do you know not to spam an alt tag with keywords, what evidence can I give them to use alt tags as you’ve outlined above?
duz said,
December 24, 2006 @ 10:51 am
There is no problem putting keywords in alt tags but there can be a problem with ‘alt tag spamming’ or ‘alt tag stuffing’. I say ‘can be’ because there are examples of the abuse of the alt tag which occur regularly in the SERPs which appear to have gone un-penalized by the search engines. So it’s not so much pointing to a threshold and saying if you only do this you’re ok but if you do this you will be penalized. It’s more to do with ‘risk vs reward’ and all we know for sure is that using the alt tag in the legitimate way as described above involves ‘no risk’. Experience also tells us that the presence or absence of alt tags makes very little difference for non-clickable images and for clickable images it is treated as anchor text. So there is no big reward in ‘alt tag spamming’ but there is an element of risk. Some people who have got away with light spamming of the alt-tags for years will say the risk is low and then there are others who are convinced that it was this practice that got them banned. My take is simply that the risk is not worth the reward now and as the SE algos improve and more people become aware of filing spam reports the risk can only become greater in the future.