Alt Tags and Keywords

[The Magus]

Good Morning

While looking at a competitors site which is very successful with search engines I noticed that every single photo on all their pages have what I would describe as "keywords" as Alt tags. The same words and descriptions are used behind every photo. This, of course, results in the words or phrases being should in the body of the page.

Whats going on here???

Is this just another way of including verbiage in the page to improve search engine results???

Thanks

Jack:confused:

[Charles]

Search engines now search the BODY of your page and the authors of the pages you describe are using a most cruel technique to pass information to those search engines. And it's cruel on the order of taking white canes from blind people standing on the corner waiting for the omnibus.

The "alt" attribute is required with all images and it establishes what should be displayed when the image cannot be - as with Braille and audio browsers. It's an accessibility feature to aid the blind and others using text-only browsers. If your image conveys some textual information then the "alt" attribute needs to contain that same information. If you image is just window dressing then use alt="".

If you want to make your page accessible to search engines then make your page accessible. Get rid of using tables for layout, use HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS, and follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/). And note, it's particularly important with search engines to properly mark up you headings. Use the H elements.