First thing first, yes, anchor text will count more than alt attributes on images, though I doubt it'll really help you in this case. From what I can tell, your links aren't surrunded by any real content that relates to "free Web hosting" so the relative weight they'll have will be minimal at best due to the lack of a contextual relationship between your link and the content that surrounds it in the first place (if any). They don't love crawling text over images. The simple fact of the matter is they cannot crawl images so they use the alt attribute's value to identify what the image is, just like a screen reader or text-based browser would (though they will also try to use the content surrounding it as well it's present). Furthermore, images are not used for attraction - background images (which should be served by the stylesheet) I can see being used for presentation (attraction as you put it), but several other images are used as part of the content, and it is these images that should have the alt attributes included. Also, alt attributes do not describe what the image is, they identify it for the benefit of those who cannot see it, such as dialup users with images turned off, blind people (as well as those with difficulty seeing things) using a screen reader, text-based browsers such as Lynx, and also search engine spiders. If you want to describe what the image is about, use the title attribute instead. The latter, obviously. If you want to have the text link and still have your graphic, you may want to look at using a CSS based image substitution technique such as the Gilder-Levin method. This may cause the pages to be flagged for human review, but since you're not "hiding" anything or stuffing keywords (all you'll be doing is presenting a graphic alternative for the same text) or doing anything that's obviously unacceptable, you should be fine. If you're not sure, send Google an email asking them if this use of an image substitution technique is not against their TOS just to make sure (you may want to do the same with the other search engines as well to be on the safe side). If they don't have a problem with it, then feel free to use it (though I'd also include a title attribute as well with the words "Hosting provided by (the name of your hosting site)". I'd avoid the "free web" for obvious reasons - one, you don't want to duplicate keywords, and two, it'll also help reinforce your site's brand awareness among Internet users looking for hosting. Having alt attributes will not make the site more crawlable or easier to crawl. Alt attributes are used for accessibility reasons, not SEO. THANK YOU! I'm glad I'm not the only one around here saying this! What anchor text? There would be no text because the image would be the link. The image substitution method I suggested however, would take care of that quite easily if the search engines are OK with that particular use of the technique. While the attribute will help, if Google can find the image, it will index it unless you tell it not to. Having relevant content that is associated with the image will help even more. Hmm... makes me wonder if an XML file for image metadata could be useful here (but that's getting off-topic so I'll stop digressing now). Look into the image substitution technique I suggested. You might find it's the best of both worlds here, since you have your anchor text as well as the image (for those who are using CSS capable browsers with images supported/enabled).
wow.. huge post there Dan Schulz! Thank you for all the info! Last question.. once I make this change (from img to text), how long do you think it would take google to start taking it into account?
No clue. Google will take its sweet time re-spidering all the individual sites as it sees fit; some sites will be re-spidered frequently, others rarely. It all depends on how often the individual sites get re-spidered and the search engines' databases get updated.
Thanks, Matt. @ WraithStrider - it's actually best to use the appropriate markup for the job that needs to be done (and frankly, to be honest, ranking well in search engines is not HTML's job).
IMO alt="free web hosting" or text ="free web hosting" is onpage optimization whereas anchor text="free web hosting" is offpage. so they both are different in term of seo and ranking. if you doing that onpage thing you are doing something good for that page while if you are doing the offpage things you are doing good for the other outbound link page.
redspace, onsite SEO is defined as anything having to do with the Web page (or in this case, markup) itself. Off-site SEO is mostly just marketing, trying to advertise, market and promote your site to other sites so you can pointing back to yours. That's the "definition" in a nutshell (in other words, grossly over-simplified).