How Important is ALT Text In Search
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Original Message
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Name: qualihost
Date: August 22, 2005 at 05:50:25 Pacific
Subject: How Important is ALT Text In SearchOS: windowsCPU/Ram: 1000mb |
Comment: Hi, This is manish from Company QualiSpace. I got one email related to Alt Tag to the images. In that email the author mention that the major search engines like google, Yahoo, MSN etc., are not considers ALT Text when determining relevancy. So is it important to use keywords in alt tags? manish parkar
web hosting & domain name registration by QualiSpace
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Response Number 1
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Name: Michael J (by mjdamato)
Date: August 22, 2005 at 08:51:50 Pacific
Subject: How Important is ALT Text In Search |
Reply: (edit)Who was the source of that email? Unless it came from a VERY knowledgeable source I would question its validity. I say this because it makes sense to me that that the search engines would use the alt text when determining relevancy. But, I can't say that for a fact. In any case, the alt text does serve other purposes - the importance of which is up to you. But, impaired surfers have browsers that use the alt text of images to help them. Also, there are still many non-impaired surfers (tech heads mostly, linux, etc.) that use text-only browsers. Lastly, if a users has images turned off for whatever reason, I believe, the alt text will be used in the image's place if available.
Michael J
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Response Number 3
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Name: anonproxy
Date: August 22, 2005 at 23:52:59 Pacific
Subject: How Important is ALT Text In Search |
Reply: (edit)Anyone who knows exactly how the major search engines work would not be sending you an email about it. There are all sorts of theories about how search engines rate. Let's ignore them for now. Here is what I surmise: - alt fields are parsed by all major search engines.
- they are suspect fields and given a low weight, but are used.
- if the image is part of a link, that greatly increases it's relevancy.
- spam is pretty easily detected.
- keyword density matters to Google and the alt field is included in that (more keywords = less relevance per keyword). According to XHTML (and for screen readers), you should use alt fields for every image.
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Response Number 4
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Name: crandall87
Date: August 27, 2005 at 14:11:30 Pacific
Subject: How Important is ALT Text In Search |
Reply: (edit)ALT tags are imporant. you should always have relevant alt tags for your images. remember when search engines crawl you they will see a text version of your site. alt tags are included and they will find them. they are probably not as important as text or titles but still needed especially if you follow strict XHTML http://www.craigrandall.co.uk
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