Just had a thought about images and anchor text embedded within the same anchor link, e.g. <a href="http://www.joeblogs.com"><img src="/images/logo.jpg" border="0" alt="Joe Blogs SEO Forum"><br>www.joeblogs.com</a> Now my question is this: In the eyes of the search engines which element gives you the link benefit, the alt text "Joe Blogs SEO Forum" or the actual text "www.joeblogs.com" or better still a combination of the two???
Typically, you don't see both... Either the link is a text link in which case the search engines use the link text between the opening <a> and closing </a> tags OR it's an image link in which case the search engines use the alt="xxx" attribute of the <img> element. I'm pretty sure that they first look for link text. If found then they use it. Else they look to see if it's an image link in which case they look for the alt="xxx" attribute and if found use that. So my guess is that they would use the link text www.joeblogs.com which is not that great IMO. Google at least will see that as "www joeblogs com" once they normalize it. So unless you're trying to rank for "www" or "joeblogs" or "com" or some combination those words, it would not be that great as a link text.
I'm planning to use this for a 'Link to us' type banner, so was going to include the site logo and url all in one <a> instance. I already rank well for my brand name, the text link is more of a user friendly, and the alt text is for the crawlers. So do you think the alt or text will be passing on the benefit?
we can use different anchor text to same link, bcoz we target more than 1 keyword / page Google can't able to read images. So, it understands only alternative text and gives preference to alt text. For hyperlinks, we can't use "alt". We use "title" attributes for hyperlinks. Which gives priority, rather than simple links. Using "title" tag is one of the parts of on-page optimization.