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Image Alt Attribute Confession and Impact
I’ve been doing search engine optimization since 1997 and have given too much and too little attention to image alt attributes (often called alt tags). It’s time to confess that they may have more value and could be worth your time in some situations.
Obviously, it’s good to describe some images if it’s a usability function, especially for those with disabilities.
From a search engine perspective, it’s widely known that image attributes/tags rate fairly low in the ranking influence game. Other SEO consultants have encouraged me - and I have to agree - that it can’t hurt and may help to be keyword focused on images that affect the entire website (i.e. the navigation). Depending on the volume of pages, the presence of keywords in the alt attribute could have some influence.
For most websites, this isn’t a big time issue either, but it could help in view of related strategies you use on the website. I still meet marketers, however, who believe they’ve hit some keyword/content impact just because they use keywords with images. They’ll never compare to real, visible text.
I’m open to the alt magic. What are your thoughts?
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Hello,
There are regions of bot scrutiny within the code of any web page that when readable all applicable regions are weighted together concerning the keyword density percentage for the keywords you are trying to achieve placement for concerning that page. Regionality is dependent on the “coding” environment.
The alt density attributes should always be included within the pages statistical density spread when statistically measuring keyword density patterns on all additional regions on the page.
Density levels are weighted by statistical keyword spread on the page for the “cluster” of keywords you are trying to achieve placement for, so anchor text, semantic variants, Root term descriptors, compound word structures properly weighted and placed within these regions of bot scrutiny all factor into the statistical page content density levels..(20% Density top - 15% Density Mid page or 50% Density bottom page - percentages change with vertical and competitor levels) etc.. I have tested alt percentage density spreads based on the regions of the page against many competitor levels along with other region specific clusters on a page and found that alt statistical page weighting is in fact relevant.
Now we have Google’s Universal search impacting this density spread other regions on page and off now will impact the whole site - social media, video, naming SWF’s, images, .doc files, .pdf’s, blog content, Press, etc…
It is going to get interesting….
I’m open to any possibility that can up my page rank. So, I may try this one.
Thanks for the comments. The whole issue of optimization is compounded by overall site architecture, keyword themes, the number and quality of inbound links, site age, etc. Heather’s comments about density contribute to the results. Unfortunately, any one factor - density, site age, domain name, page names, header names - gets lost in the crowd. In other words, you don’t really know what’s having the biggest impact, especially if you put all of the elements in place at one time. I do think alt tags can contribute to density. Heather’s note about clustering is especially important, especially with anchor text of links on your pages. My alt/image dilemma over the years has been clouded by the fact that I’ve helped many websites rank well on Google (top 5) for compeititive keywords without worrying about alt attributes. That just means something else is working well too.