I have been dabbling in
SEO for the past 2 years and had very respectable results.
When I first started, I purchased
Web Position Gold and had what I felt were extremely good results. At first I used it to generate pages and rate pages already made. As time went on I depended less and less on the software and more on a gut feel and my ranking kept increasing.
I just attended what I felt was a very good
SEO workshop for a week and was advised that Alt Tags no longer mater for
SEO and as a mater of fact I felt as though it was hinted that it might be looked at as spam. The people who gave the workshop are known in the
SEO industry and the workshop was a very good beginning for people who are just starting
SEO. The teachers were experts on writing of content, utilizing certain software, and collecting
SEO information for a variety of different sources. They were not coders or people who can break algorithms.
When I just wrote a page, I left out the alt tags and ran it through an updated Web Position Page Critique (The part of the program that analyzes your pages and tells you what you need to do) and it suggested I add the tags. If it could it would have screamed it at me.
Does anyone have any hard evidence to leave the tags out? I don’t want to be spamming but I don’t want to lose what I feel is a fair edge either.
Of course I am not condoning cramming keywords into alt tags but to “naturally describe” the image and use keywords if appropriate.