Does ALT in IMG tag make a difference for SEO?

I'm talking about inbound links that are a picture.

For example :

<a href="www.site.com"><img src="picture.gif" alt="KEYWORD"></a>

 

Yes, but don't use just keywords to "spam" your page. The alt attribute is used to give a contexual description of the image if it cannot be displayedl; meaning if your using a text browser or screen reader. Search engines also use this as a description of the image and it can help rank properly in the Google image index.

 

So in addition to helping the referring site rank in google images, it also helps the site the image is linking to? In other words, it works the same as anchor text in a text link?

 

yes, if you want the image to show up in Google Images

 

I understand about google images. What I'm asking about is whether it also helps the site the image is linking to? In other words, it works the same as anchor text in a text link?

 

If you have a hyperlink attached to that image that in a sense yes, but doesn't contain the same value as proper anchor text with no link. This is actually a question many SEO people debate over but no quality results in testing have proven it one way or another.

 

Thank you very much.

 

It helps especially to get obscure search terms to rank on the page, when they aren't even mentioned anywhere else on the page. I use alt tags to rank for misspellings and such. For instance if my search is Underwater Basket Weaving, and I notice that people consistently misspell it like this: Underwater Bascket Weavin or whatever, I'll throw that misspelling in 2-3 alt tags on the page, and in many cases that's enough to rank for that obscure phrase as long as the rest of the page is thematically related.

Make sense?

 

The alt attribute is for "images" in the image index, not for on-page optimization in regular SERPs, your doing all that for nothing.

 

I'm pretty sure that the text in ALTs are somehow used for the overall ranking of the page. There are several keyword density checkers that include it in their end result, so I'm imagining they got that idea from somewhere.

 

Sorry, but thats not what their "usage" is in hyper text markup language, this thing called HTML. Google views these as a text browser or screen reader would, so it replaces the image and gives a "description of the image". YouTube "Matt Cutts" Alt" and watch the official video.

 

the cached text view shows the alt text as a link in place of the image. remember this is what the spider sees, so act accordingly

 

use it wisely, don't overdo it, and don't spam your ALTs. don't forget to put it on your image links, since it will serve as anchor text.

 

ALT tags are super important friends! if used correctly, they can greatly increase your SERP

 

Yes it surely does make a change.

 

yes it does, the crawler reads the hmtl code and in that you are linking to the site the site so yes

 

google will banned my site if i do it all of image on my site ? , i try to add alt= name of photo hope it help my site best SEO

 

yes its very useful to promote your images like my site have thousand of images and i submitted in some photo related site and i was get 100% result on that

 

its very greatful.

 

ALT tags in image is a good practice. Search Engine Crawler cannot index images so ALT tags is the best way to tell the crawler what the image is about, as well as increase the readibilty for the user when images are not displayed.
You can use your keywords as Alt tags in your images but they should be related with the images.