Quick question for the search engine Guru's. If anyone has seen my other posts, I'm in the process of trying to figure out and fix the google ranking problem we've been having with our site. In short: pr6, hundreds of thousands of backlinks, 9yr old domain, used to be top 10 on all SE, now top 10 everywhere except google (barely top 100 on google). Anyway, back to the question. We put a little icon/logo on member pages that links back to our site. The alt tag on the image is "free web hosting". Would there be a big change in terms of SEO if I were to replace the icon/logo with something like "Free Web Hosting"? Does anchor text count for more then alt tags in images? Also, if I were to make that change, how long would it take for the effects to ripple thru the google rankings?
Actually SEs love crawling text than images but the images are added for some attraction.. That's why alt tag are use to define the image what is the description of it... The alt text is the description of the image...
I understand that.. but will there be a difference in terms of SE rank between: (a) 500,000 sites linking to us with an img with an alt text of "free web hosting" (b) 500,000 sites linking to us with the text "free web hosting"
Think anchor text will be much better use it for youself. And thunderbolt007 right images crawled less faster.
yeah because using your keyword as an anchor text is a real great way of having your keywords rank as by having it as your alt only some what makes your image related to the content of your site and makes your site more crawlable...
Oh I see. Okay, I'm going to switch it to anchor text and we'll see what happens. Should be interesting to see how it effects the SE's! How long do you think it will take google to factor the changes into the rankings?
SEOmoz have a great article on Google ranking factors. It contains opinions from a number of well known and respected SEO's including Aaron Wall, Danny Sullivan and Rand Fishkin. The general consensus seems to be be that the anchor text of an inbound link is of 'exceptional importance' whereas the keyword use in Alt tags is described as being of 'moderate importance'. http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors - Matt
Yes, anchor text adds much more weight then a image alt tag would. I rank in the top 5 SERP on google for funny pictures mostly with just that, well among other things ofcourse!
There's no such thing as an alt tag. That might seem like a minor complaint, but SEO only gets more and more complicated compared to basic html. My feeling is if we can't accurately describe the markup that search engine spiders crawl and index the content of, trying to talk about SEO is hopeless. Sorry if this seems nit picky, but an attribute versus a tag is important. And gets moreso as we talk about title, style, and others that could be either, some of which can affect ranking. Put another way, this is not valid or understood by FireFox or GoogleBot <alt><img src="x.gif" /></alt> /rant
Anchor text should definitely do better then alt tag. I do not think alt tag does much anyway after all those spammers out there run their course on it. Other suggestions: You shouldn't have the SAME exact keyword on all those incoming links. Vary them a little.
Sorry about that. I meant the alt attribute: <img src="x.gif" alt="x" /> katwright... the links i'm talking about is from our member sites, so it would kind of be 500,000+ of the same anchor text. I wonder if I can use a php script or ad rotation script to rotate the anchor text between a few keywords? would that help?
No reason to be sorry. That's just my being a programmer spilling over. But I'm convinced the more accurately we can talk about markup, the better we understand how the spiders consume it. Although for this particular question I think you've found a consensus answer that alternate text for images has much less value than anchor text in links. What, exactly, are you trying to optimize? Mayhaps people will have ideas specific to image optimization? I'm not sure whether he's a member of this forum, but I ran into a guy who runs a photo site on a different webmaster forum, who can probably give you some good advice. Dude's name is Forest Corce, you should drop him a note. He made a post a while ago about using both by putting the img inside the a element the way a lot of people do with p's, and then using CSS to make it look nice. I don't know whether that diminishes the anchor text, though?
The exact scenario is that we run a very large free web hosting service (500,000+ active members). We've always had a footer icon on the member pages linking back to our free hosting service. Now we are thinking about replacing the icon with anchor text to increase SE rankings. Specifically since we somehow dropped to #90-100 on google (while still being in top 10 on yahoo, etc..) for all of our keywords.
I think anchor text has more weight than image alt attribute. just a correction, an "alt" is not a "tag", its an "img" "tag" "attribute". then, the image with alt attribute for me is much appealing of course because of the image.
Hmmm. If I'm understanding properly, I'm not sure that will help. The real power of anchor text is its ability to associate a page or URL with a keyword or keyphrase. I think either link would pass on the same generalized ranking power, it's that a text link would be more helpful in ranking for something in particular. I'm not sure whether that's what you want to do?
well, you can also link an image with an alt text on it. the alt text can also consist your keyword or keyphrase. also there is this title attribute which contains also a text where you can indicate your keyword or keyphrase. title attribute is read by bots also.
Here is the best way to put this, the image alt tag helps two different things. 1. Helps you images appear in Google Images. 2. Helps your hypertext links via images to have some sort of text weight, but you get much better weight with anchor text hyperlinks.
This is basicly correct. Not only does the link provide a so called "vote" for that website, it gives a basic description\keyword\key-phrase with the anchor text.
Yeah, that's pretty much what i'm trying to do. I'm trying to increase SE rankings for the keyword "free web hosting". I'm just thinking a link with that text is better then an image with alt="free web hosting".