Quick question: Does image links with an alt tag have the same effect as a text link. i.e. is this <a href="digitalpoint.com"><img src="dp.jpg" alt="digitalpoint.com"/></a> the same thing as this <a href="digitalpoint.com">digitalpoint.com</a> I'm working on an online store and having an image link looks much better in terms of the layout/look and feel. I'll change them if I have to but would like to know how they compare. Thanks in advance.
A text link should hold more importance than an image link but dont let that get in the way of your design.
Thank you for the input. Just to be 100% certain..... the alt tag is what I should be using to make the link readable by the crawlers correct?
Erm..yes but try and think about the user first. Imagine what the visitor sees if they have images disabled in the browser, make sure the ALT text makes sense to the human reader. Always test your design with a text browser, you'd be surprised on how messed up a site can look when people focus on search engines.
They both provide wieght SEO wise, anchor text from a hyperlink is more effective seo wise than the alt element in a image link.
Certain size images are associated with advertisements and will not pass PR or even it would seem, be followed. I've had this happen with 125x125. Matt Cutts also stated this in his blog. Stay away from typical advertisement banner sizes and you should be fine.
You guys are awesome, Is there anyway to know for sure whether or not this is happening. The only reason I'm concerned is b/c I'm trying to optimize a site which has an image link to it from a PR4 site. The site I'm working on doesn't even have a PR1.
Unfortunately, I don't think so Matt listed a bunch of common sizes that he said Google was able to pick out as banners (ie. Paid links). I found out that it was working on me because of this site. http://www.norcalcars.com/showroom.asp. There are two banners, both point to pages on my main site that I give details about the norcalcars site. For the "dealers" banner I also have links in the footer and so this page received a high PR. For the other banner (advertise on NorCalCars), I only had the banner pointing to the page. Both were up for the same amount of time and that page stayed "Unranked". When I put a text link under the banner it eventually started to gain in PR. That and what Matt said convinced me that Google counted it as a paid link and did not follow the link. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/selling-links-that-pass-pagerank down in comments search for 125 to find it.
As it was said before text link carries more weight than image link (anchor is believed to be more valuable than alt attribute). Also remarks about avoiding standard banner sizes should taken into account. Some SEO authorities reffered to it according to research made by Wiep Knol about link value factors -> http://wiep.net/link-value-factors/. It\'s a good lecture if you want to know how you should, and how you shouldn\'t use links in SEO campaigning.
the text in your anchor has more weight compare to alt attribute,. The two can improve your SERP but focus more anchoring your kW as SE added lot of weight this one make no mistake of calling alt attribute as a tag, its not a tag, its just a attribute of the image tag anyway, yes, since SE can't read images it is advisable to add text in alt attribute, you can add KW here, just make sure it fits on the image
Everyone should benchmark this concept. We did. You should use only text links for SEO reasons. Image links are for cosmetic reasons only.
If your are only using a text link. I suggest to put "title" after the href to make the link more readable. like this: <a href="http://www.xyz.com" title="xyz.com">xyz.com</a>