Image Alt Tags. SEO or Accessibility?

[Dave@Profitistic]

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When assessing SEO technique, how much value should be put on ALT tags?

I can't help but think that the effect they have on the Google ranking algorithm is now so minor that the ALT tag should be used purely for accessibility reasons.

Any thoughts?

[CompareStore]

I agree that they do not hold as much weight as they used to however if you use the alt tag to properly describe what the image is it shouldn't matter. After all if you have a picture of a football on your football site and the alt text is "Picture of a football" then you're covering both bases!

I would steer well clear of putting alt tags on things like corners of boxes and stuffing them with keywords though as this is more likely to have a negative effect if any at all.

[hawkwind dave]

i totally agree with CompareStore. What little weight they have is still a 'bit of weight'.

as for image tags in general....

Webnauts makes it clear and simple in this post at DC Tip....
http://www.davidcastle.org/BB/isn-t-...260.html#18592

[DioBach]

I've always practised the art of making both the alt and image filenames as descriptive as possible. Why? Well, if you get an image get a top rank in the image search, watch your traffic shoot up. I've had a couple of nice ones go front page, and seen thousands of surfers come in via image search.

In one instance, a top image ranking bought me 30,000+ extra visitors over a 3 month period. So IMO they are very important for SEO purposes, as lets face it, SEO is about getting both rank and traffic.

I recommend going to these sort of lengths:

path: /images/celebrities/johnny-depp-portrait.jpg
alt: Johnny Depp portrait shot - sat in chair with beer

path: /images/cameras/nikon-d50.jpg
alt: Front view of the new D50 DSLR by Nikon

As well as the SEO benefits, don't forget that you're also helping out those with screen readers.

[Cool]

Image Alt tags are necessary when you validate your site according to W3C guidelines(World wide web consortium)

In alt tags you should give the concise information about your image.You can insert keywords according to your image.

It would preferred that alt tags sholud be there in image tag

[Brendon]

SEO and accessibility are sort of 2 issues. For accessibility, having a good description of an image in the alt is vital.

For SEO, images can be used 2 ways, 1) content, 2) links

1) "What little weight they have". Ex-squeeze me, "little weight"? Go poke around in some cometitive SERPs, and tell me it's "little weight". I've seen pages rank for terms that ONLY APPEARED IN ALT TEXT. True, you need a powerful root domain to make that really fly, but it's still possible. Spammy, but possible

2) Links. Alt text for image links is handled as anchor text. 'Nuff said

[winningratings]

Like anything Google are always aware that chnges they make will then be copied and overused e.g. once people know that ALT tags are picked up by the Google spider, then some people will have loads and loads of them all over the place, which just destroys the whole thing completly

This is why Google have to constantly keep changing things around a bit

However I think that ALT tags are very important, because Google will probably significantly downgrade your website, if ALT tags are missing altogether

So its a case of always make sure you have ALT tags set, but like everything, on its own, its not going to make a massive difference

I think you should concentrate on content and particularly lots of different webpages all targeting a different keyword phrase. There are thousands of keyword phrases where there is very little competition from other sites, so in my opinion these are the keyword phrases to go for