hi I'm in the middle of an SEO campaign for my website . My webmaster is doing all the technical stuff while i supply the info. He has mentioned that my menu links - 20 of them-(graphics in effect even thought they have text in them saying what the links are)- are "rollover menus", ie when a cursor rolls over the HOME button or other main menu link, it tells the browser to load a second rollover -state image, so that actually there are 40 individual file names to take into account and 40 alt tags to sort out, rather than 20 of each the question is, how does one approach the SEO for these ? Eg for any given graphic menu link, due to it being duplicated when the cursor goes over it...does that mean i need to pick DIFFERENT keywords for alt tag 1 and alt tag 2 (duplicate)of that one image ? and DIFFERENT keywords for file name 1 and file name 2 (duplicate) of that one link? i am not a webmaster , nor do i know a huge amount about SEO but have read reams throughout preparing for my campaign and have never come across this issue... my common sense tells me that spiders index the original alt tag/file name, and not any duplicate of those that appear only if and when someone puts their cursor over any of the menu links...so therefore just the one set of keywords will do...? i shouldn't need to dream up a second set for the duplicates? i hope someone can help as we cant move forward with things until we know the answer ! thanks!
I wouldn't bother with that...the SE's may not read the alts on the second image anyway, if it uses Javascript to do the change. ~Adam
My personal opinion is you dont need to use two alt tag descriptions, alt tags are not a very powerful SEO issue and certainly not when your talking about swapping images on links. I take it your using javascript to replace the images in the links. I think this issue bares minor significance in comparison to alot of the main SEO factors so dont spend time worrying about this, get on with the rest. What matters more is your actual link text which should always be plain html text links which contain some of your keywords. At most complemented by css background images and not javascript roll over menu links. Only use javascript if absolutely necessary. Also if possible rather than using javascript to create rollover image links why not use css background image positioning? This method only uses one image for each link rather than two and is a much cleaner way if your web master can do them. It also eliminates the need for javascript and wasting time on alt tags.
Its easy to get paranoid about such things. If you do go CSS route...I guess you can sleep at night again.
thanks for the replies changing to css sounds simpler, but may cost me more money as he'd have to re-do all the menu graphic links what about putting "no index" tags in the duplicate file name and alt tag? after all, the original file and alt tag for that image will be indexed so i dont need it indexed twice...and this way there is no worry about duplicating text in these attributes????? I can't seem to find a single article about duplicating the text for image alt tags and file names in rollover menus, so i can't be really sure if it is fine or not fine to do so, so it's bugging me a little! he is going to be putting text links to these same menu titles at bottom of all web pages anyway thanks again