Guidelines for keywords in image alt tags

[Taraboom]

I was wondering what are basic engagement rules for entering alt text for images .
It seem to be an accepted practice to use this tag to enter additional keywords or to reinforce existing ones.
At the same time at least in theory this tag should have image description.

A tag: Enter Button, Jewelery, White Gold, Cut your own diamonds
looks a bit like spamming and might be penalized by SE if not instantly but in the near future.

Can somebody please comment what rules do they use fro these tags and if there are any guidelines.

Thank you in advance

[Taraboom]

Apologies, just found this link:
http://www.webproworld.com/search-engine-optimization-forum/98152-images-alt-tag-solutions.html

[Little Sister]

You should remember to also throw in the title attribute - there are several reasons to do this. One is because certain browsers read and display the title attribute, the second is because and title is different than the alternative - take advantage of keywords in both instances. Also there is no penalty for excessive use of keywords in your alt/title attributes but don't spam.

[wordgeist]

Do you think that puting relevant keywords in the name of image is also helpful with search engines?

[HTMLBasicTutor]

<rant>It's called the alt attribute! (image steam coming out of my ears, there's no smiley for that here)</rant>

The alt attribute (alternative text attribute) is intended for:

accessibility
those who surf with images off
in case your image doesn't show


What are alt attributes useful for?
The alt attribute is defined in a set of tags (namely, img, area and optionally for input and applet) to allow you to provide a text equivalent for the object.

A text equivalent brings the following benefits to your web site and its visitors in the following common situations:

•nowadays, Web browsers are available in a very wide variety of platforms with very different capacities; some cannot display images at all or only a restricted set of type of images; some can be configured to not load images. If your code has the alt attribute set in its images, most of these browsers will display the description you gave instead of the images
•some of your visitors cannot see images, be they blind, color-blind, low-sighted; the alt attribute is of great help for those people that can rely on it to have a good idea of what's on your page
•search engine bots belong to the two above categories: if you want your website to be indexed as well as it deserves, use the alt attribute to make sure that they won't miss important sections of your pages.

What should I put in my alt attribute?
The generic rule for the content of the alt attribute is: use text that fulfills the same function as the image.

Some more specific rules:

•if the image is simply decorated text , put the text in the alt attribute
•if the image is used to create bullets in a list, a horizontal line, or other similar decoration, it is fine to have an empty alt attribute (e.g., alt=""), but it is better to use things like list-style-image in CSS
•if the image presents a lot of important information, try to summarize it in a short line for the alt attribute and add a longdesc link to a more detailed description
http://w3.org/QA/Tips/altAttribute

Would like to add: do not put text in the alt attribute for decorative images that form part of your visual design. e.g. some people still use tables for layout and put say a border in a cell. This is not an image that requires an alt attribute nor is it a place to keyword stuff.

As the purpose of the alt attribute is to describe the image to those who can't see it you can make the description make sense and use a keyword or two in that description. Accessibility and SEO are then covered.

You could also watch this video by Matt Cutts: Matt video: ALT attributes for images http://mattcutts.com/blog/matt-video-alt-attributes-for-images/

[DavidF]

How come an image with both alt and title tags will fail verification? Which one should be used?

[HTMLBasicTutor]

How come an image with both alt and title tags will fail verification? Which one should be used?
Because the image tag doesn't have a title attribute.:wink:
HTML <img> Tag (http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_IMG.asp)
Including an image: the IMG element (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#edef-IMG)

[ShaneHunter]

img alt tags don't really help total page seo in my experience. but if you want to rank an image for a keyword in say google images - then it's important. =)

[stampa]

Main thing is to make the naming useful and it should relate to the image. And I think naming the image with the correct keywords is good too as it gets picked up by google images.

[thersey]

I was wondering what are basic engagement rules for entering alt text for images .
It seem to be an accepted practice to use this tag to enter additional keywords or to reinforce existing ones.
At the same time at least in theory this tag should have image description.

A tag: Enter Button, Jewelery, White Gold, Cut your own diamonds
looks a bit like spamming and might be penalized by SE if not instantly but in the near future.

Can somebody please comment what rules do they use fro these tags and if there are any guidelines.

Thank you in advance

1. Images that are properly labelled and tagged will help in SEO
2. Use appropriate keywords that describe the image. Stuffing a bunch of keywords that are not related to the image is considered spam.
3. It is good practice to include width and hieght attributes to image
4. You can gain some extra points if you link the image to a larger version of a properly labelled image.