Comments on: Optimising Alt Attributes

By: How To: Get Your Site Indexed (Part 2) | How To Get Indexed - Case Study

How To: Get Your Site Indexed (Part 2) | How To Get Indexed - Case Study — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 17:27:16 +0000

[...] is pretty clever, and while it can’t SEE images, it does value their alt attributes and it’s fair to say that Google probably knows that a page which has image is of more use to [...]

By: EggManJohn (EggManJohn)

EggManJohn (EggManJohn) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 09:37:35 +0000

@ryanroberts been there! http://tinyurl.com/4frfby

By: John

John — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 21:12:02 +0000

Hi Thomas, thanks for commenting! You’re completely right in what you’re saying, I should have chosen my words a little more carefully. By description I meant a description of what the image is, but not describing the image itself, as you said!

By: Thomas Thomassen

Thomas Thomassen — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 17:53:20 +0000

The alt attribute isn’t for describing the image. It’s to offer a text alternative to the image. Very important difference.

Example; you have an yellow explanation icon at the beginning of a paragraph to indicate an important comment. The alt attribute shouldn’t then describe how it looks like, “Yellow triangle with black explanation icon”, it should say something like “Warning:”, “Attention:” or similar.

I’m posting this because I see it said so many times that alt=”" is for describing, while it’s not and I feel it’s important to emphasize this difference.

By: John

John — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:02:02 +0000

Well spotted! thankyou!
It does now :)

By: rominiek

rominiek — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:35:45 +0000

the funny thing is that the picture posted with your story doesn’t got an alt attribute