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ALT Tags - what is the truth? :)

by meccabiz
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I've heard that you should put keywords in ALT tags for images and then I've heard that they should be describing the image only. Which suggestion is correct?

Thanks so much!
#alt #tags #truth
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Simply adding a few relevant keywords is fine. I have ranked thumbnail images in Google text search.
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    • Profile picture of the author meccabiz
      So even if the image has nothing to do with my keywords, is it okay to put them in the alt tag or would it be better to describe the image itself in that instance?
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      • Profile picture of the author mogamre
        Originally Posted by meccabiz View Post

        So even if the image has nothing to do with my keywords, is it okay to put them in the alt tag or would it be better to describe the image itself in that instance?
        Yes, that is fine even if image is of different nature than your keyword. As G cannot read what's in the image. They can only read them via alt tags or surrounding text.
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        • Profile picture of the author yukon
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          Originally Posted by mogamre View Post

          Yes, that is fine even if image is of different nature than your keyword. As G cannot read what's in the image. They can only read them via alt tags or surrounding text.
          Google has some ways of figuring out the subject of an image, they can even read text from inside an image with OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which is how they scan offline books & convert to text for Google Books (public domain, etc...). I'm sure OCR is used for any Google product/algo that involves images, here's an example outside of Google Books.

          If the image came from an online source, odds are it's already been categorized with relevant keywords. You can check that by pasting the image URL into Google Images & looking at the search results that usually shows a keyword phrase per image (Best guess for this image:).

          IMO plain text/links outside of the image (including alt-text) carries most of the SEO weight for images, still I'm sure things like OCR plays a roll in the image algo.

          OP, it would help If you gave a more detailed idea of what your doing.
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  • Profile picture of the author anoopsparx
    you should write the alt that describe the image. No need to add only keywords related stuff.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dimitris
    how I do it with images:

    1. right click on picture and copy URL

    2. go on TinEye Reverse Image Search and paste URL, this will check on how many sites your image already appear, also you will see for what terms it is used. In my opinion it doesn't have sense to put alt tag for your niche if the main use of picture is in completely different niche.

    3. if image doesn't contain text, open your image in some image editing software akka photoshop and rotate it by flipping horizontal. This should make your image unique. "Save as" yourkeywords.jpeg.

    4. Right click on image, properties>details: give your image title, description, tag it with your keywords, put your homepage URL in comments and copyright.

    5. Upload image on your site, repeat the step 1 and 2 to check uniqueness of your image

    6. Add descriptive alt tag no matter if it describes image or not. For example, if your site is about hemorrhoids and you put image of flowers (which is something I don't understand why you should do that), write something like "Natural Hemorrhoids Treatment is Your Best Option"...

    I don't use direct keywords in alt tag, I rather write a single sentence including my keywords.
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    • Profile picture of the author Agryd
      The word ALT stand for alternate. So the text should resemble to your image. In case if the image doesn't get loaded, visitors could understand from alt text about that image. There is no harm if you fit keywords in alt tags but nowadays Google has become very intelligent. With OCR it can read images. Even when you upload any image you can get information about all the websites using that image.
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