is google pay attention towards alt tags, is keyword placed in alt tags are used to increase keyword density of that page and is it counted by google??
since SE can't read images, it is advisable to use alt attribute. Put keywords on it, just make sure it fits on the image as SE added weight on text enclosed with alt attribute
hard sell, i use them anyways, but i hear so much for each argument that I have no idea witch is true.
Alt tag is very helpful not only in spider but also in human visitor. It tells what the picture is all about.
As images cannot be read from spiders and from people that have severe visual impairments alt tags help to understand what an image is about. You can use alt tags to describe a image, but not to stuff with keywords, a short and precise description is always better than a keyword rich description. Here are some more details on image optimization, hope it helps.
alt tags help your image rank in a search engine so it is useful in a lot of ways, it also helps your keyword density. try to use it, it wont hurt your site and make your site look like a pro.
THEY ARE NOT ALT TAGS. THEY ARE ATTRIBUTES. Ok, now that I have that out of the way... Yes, Google will pay attention to them. Don't expect them to work very well for SEO though since they are intended to IDENTIFY THE IMAGE, making it essential for accessibility. If you're going to sneak a keyword or two into an image, put them in the image file's name, use the proper alt attribute content to identify the image, and then use a title attribute to describe the image (if, for example you have a .jpg file of Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre, use brett-favre.jpg as your image name, then use "Brett Favre" as the alt attribute for the image and "Green Bay Packers future Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre" as the title attribute). And yes, as a Bears fan I do feel ashamed for using a Cheesehead quarterback as an example for this, but all will be good on Thursday when the Packers and Cowboys beat each other into a bloody pulp on Thursday.
GFMIII, if you like that, look at the first link in my signature (it goes to another thread here on the forums).
ALT tags makes your site more accessible to visually impaired people using text readers. The use of ALT tags in SEO is low. The major search engines give low importance of ALT tags in their algorithm. ALT tags are required element for HTML. Every image have an ALT tag.
Yes google gives importance to it. So do add them no harm correct yes its bit time consuming. as per XHTML you should have alt tag no matter you keep it blank
Ya know, I remember saying something about ALT earlier in this thread... Now, just to continue the introduction to HTML, ALT is not a tag, it is not an element. It is an attribute of the IMG element, which is used to identify what an image is for those times when the image cannot be displayed, regardless of whether it is a text-based browser such as Lynx, a dialup user who has disabled images to improve download response times, or a search engine spider crawling a Web page. It is required in both HTML and XHTML, and is a vital component of Web accessibility. Now, if you have an image that has a blank ALT attribute, that alone tells me one of two things - you're either pulling the wool over the W3C HTML validator, or you have a background image. If it's the former, you have two choices - put in text that identifies the image, or step away from the computer and get a McJob. If it's the latter, then remove the image from the HTML since it's presentational in nature and serve it as a background image via your stylesheet.