Alt Tags

[Ghome1971]

I notice that my product image alt tag appears in 11th place on the page of alt image attributes. The remaining 10 alt images are gradient, logo, sitemap, info, home etc. Some eg gradient 1 and gradient 2 are not assigned text at all. How can I get SE's to either ignore them or how can I assign them useful text.

Thanks

Geraldine

www.stardustkids.co.uk

[Mike Hughes]

Go into your templates and assign them text.

Mike

[Ghome1971]

My html only stretches to finding, copying and pasting. I can find the jpg. Can you give me an HTML example of how to assign text.

Thanks

Geraldine

[Duncan Rounding]

This typical of what you need to achieve:
<img src="myimage.jpg" alt="my alt text" width="x" height="x" border=0>
You can just add the -- alt="my alt text" -- part into the tag as above if it's not there already.

[Ghome1971]

Can I give any text associated to my site eg baby clothes etc or is this seen as spam by SEs. Otherwise is it better to just put "" (no text) so the alt is ignored. I really want the SEs looking at my product image alt but it is so low down on the alt list.

Geraldine

[jont]

Remember to balance SEO with accessibility issues with ALT tags ... the ALT tag is there first and foremost to enable users with images disabled in browsers to see what the image is about... it can also assist if you have a very large image for the ALT text to appear prior to the full image loading.

If you have a background.gif which is just a colour then stuffing it with "cats, dogs, parrots and pet foods" is not the intended use but can assist in SEO work... so a better use may be something like "green background image to cats and dogs food store"

[RuralWeb]

balance SEO with accessibility issues

I would suggest that spacers and the like are assigned a "" tag. The reason for this is that every time a screen reader finds the image it will read out the alt tag - if you give an alt tag such as "spacer to kids super store" then the visitor will hear this from every page they visit, by putting "" the screen reader will skip the tag.

SEs are becoming more spam aware every day and alt tag stuffing is one thing they now look for. Follow the Google guidelines - make a site for humans NOT search engines BUT be aware of things that can adversly affect your ranking. Check out http://www.google.co.uk/support/webm....py?topic=8521