Thread: Alt Tags on Pictures

I am currently trying my hardest to set up my site for search engines so i dont have to pay hundreds to professionals to do it for me. What i have learned so far is that if you are willing to learn and do it yourself, it is possible. I have a couple of questions i would like to ask;

1. Alt tags on pictures. Is this the ''Alternate text'' box on the properties of a picture? and if so, should i just add 2 or 3 keywords into that box?

2. When naming a page to help with optimization, is this what the file is called in my directories, or is this again, the words i use in my page properties under naming page?

As you can see, i am at beginning of this process as it is a fairly technical subject to cover, but your advice and info will be greatly appreciated.

Alt Tag is the "Alternate text" , and it appears when you mouseover the image. To my knowledge, it is not taken into consideration by crawlers. It is just an information to the visitor.

2. The page name, else called Page Title, is the one you put in the Title field, under Page Properties > General. This is the name that SE will consider for your page. As a good rule, put also the name of your site there, f.e. "Navaldesign - Who we are"

AlT image attributes are a little confusing. They are two ALTS ones for text links and ones for images.

For now I will leave out the text link ALTs out you want info on Image ALTS. Google operates very differently than most search engines. One important element of a image is the ALT tag, according to Google, because it offers a a description of the image.

For example: Syntax: <img src="image.gif" Alt="keyword" height=100 widths=200>

Your image.gif is already done so is your attributes such as height and width. But what is the keyword? This is entirly up to you but apparently one can enter keywords up to six/page. But if you have six images, enter one keyword/image. What this does is sort of validate your page something Google likes.

However my experience tells me something different. I tried this on a test page I entered a keyword on my image. The page dropped a 100 spots over a two day span. Google insists on using them because it likes web pages that can be validated too leave out the ALT would cause invalid code.

Then there is conflicting info on the matter. Google doesn't pay attention to them but Yahoo and MSN do?

What I eventually did was just left them out all together. I mostly rely on page tiltes and page decriptions. Not only should your page tilte be in your source code it should appear on your visible text. When it comes to page descriptions if your page is ranking pretty good and you change something DO NOT change the decription. I did this once, I had 50 pages removed from MSN for one keyword.

So basically I am confused about the ALT tag. Most people and search engines say use them and yet I got poor results. pet121

I get quite a lot of success with alt tags on images - I get slightly more visitors through Google images than through Google (or in other words, double the visitors through Google by having a lot of images with alt tags on my site).

I would suggest you use them.

Cheers

Thanks for the answers, i am fairly happy with the SE side of things (getting there - my head spinning) was just confused by alt tags and ''alternate text'' with BV, but, if they the same thing, I'm Sorted (i hope).