The Importance Of Alt Attributes
Posted on 25. Jan, 2009 by in on page seo
It’s an attribute, Matt, not a tag. The <img> is the tag.
Notwithstanding, in this video Matt Cutts explains that because Google isn’t (yet) very good at recognising images, it uses the text in the alt attributes of your images to determine what they are about. Some descriptive information can be derived from the image’s file name – if the image has been given a meaningful name like matt-cutts-in-front-of-a-white-board.jpg, but this isn’t always the case.
You should be providing alternative textual content for your images via the alt attribute anyway, so that visitors who can’t see images can at least know what they represent, and doing this has the added advantage of giving a description to search engines too.
Accessibility. Check. Search engines. Check.
On a side note, if you go to the advanced image search page of Google images, you can instruct Google to return images that contain “faces”. I didn’t know that!
John
27. Jan, 2009
Hi
I see you caught an old domain name of mine! I never did anything with it …hope it works well for you!
John
admin
27. Jan, 2009
Hi John
Thanks, I love this domain name! Got any more….?