Hi all,

I would like to have confirmation from different people that I am allowed to do this...

My webpage is full of image like rounded corners,repeated background,banner and more, I have not used one single "alt" tag at the moment.

Let's say my website sales tshirts, am I allowed to call this top left rounded corner "blue tshirt" or yellow tshirt" to gain more rank in the search engines? I know they look for alt tags...


I wonder if I can use all my alt tags with my keywords even if they have nothing to do with it. is this cheating the search engine or kind of "legal"?


Thanks,


BamBam

It's perfectly "legal," but it's really not a good idea, because it just means people are going to see useless images in their image results (assuming this tactic gets you anywhere), and there won't be any reason for them to click on them. Target your contextual pictures - your logos and t-shirt images. Ornamental imagery belongs in a stylesheet as backgrounds anyway, though that's another lesson for another day.

Thanks for the reply,

This is very strange because all the CEO product I have ran keep telling me the same thing....your first 3 alt img have no name/keywords, apparently this is very important to the search engine, maybe I could get around by saying, "corner picture of my_site_name" instead of giving out a wrong name.


Thanks,


BamBam

Thanks for the reply,

This is very strange because all the CEO product I have ran keep telling me the same thing....your first 3 alt img have no name/keywords, apparently this is very important to the search engine, maybe I could get around by saying, "corner picture of my_site_name" instead of giving out a wrong name.


Thanks,


BamBamThey're not telling you anything wrong, in a formulaic sense. If you have images in your page, you apply keywords to alt text. Generally speaking, this is correct. What I'm contending is you probably have more fundamental issues with the coding of your site if non-contextual (ornamental) objects like box corners are part of your HTML markup at all. T-shirt thumnnails are content - these should be inserted using <img> tags and should receive appropriate alternative text. But anything that contributes to the general look of your site should be applied to your site in a different manner.

But you can't just yank stuff out unless you know what you're doing. So in the meantime, I would forget about those objects and just concentrate on the ones that will have some meaning for people when they see them in their search results. Remember, ultimately, you don't do SEO for search engines, you do it for future site visitors. Search engines are just the tool - visitors are the goal, and people might want to buy your t-shirts, but they certainly don't want to buy your box corners ;)

Hi the_pm,

You are dead right when you say the search engines are the tools and the customers the goal, I will concentrate on what is visible for now and also what I know.


Thanks for your advise,


Regards,


BamBam