ALT Tags Still Mattter

On my list of “Top Ten SEO Factors” I’ve never removed ALT tags, because I’ve seen evidence that they were still a determining factor in rankings.

Many experts have been saying for a couple of years now that “ALT tags don’t matter anymore” so they’ve stopped using them in their pages.

I even had a brief “Oh yeah? Prove it!” contest going with someone that believes ALT tags are a waste of time. Finally, after looking at my proof, they claimed that my testing sample was too small to be taken as fact.

One of the things I mentioned in my article “Top Ten Takeaways from Pubcon Vegas” was that ALT tags still matter”, and today I feel vindicated again, as I read that Vanessa Fox of Google offered this advice last week at SES:

• Take advantage of alt tags for all of your images. Make sure the alt text is descriptive and unique. For instance, alt text such as “picture1″ or “logo” doesn’t provide much information about the image. “Charting the path of stock X” and “Company Y” give more details.
• Don’t overload your alt text. Be descriptive, but don’t stuff it with extra keywords and try to cheat.
• It’s important to use alt text for any image on your pages, but if your company name, navigation, or other major elements of your pages are in images, alt text becomes especially important. Consider moving vital details to text to ensure all visitors can view them.
• Look at the image-to-text ratio on your page. How much text do you have? One way of looking at this is to look at your site with images turned off in your browser. What content can you see? Is the intent of your site obvious? Do the pages convey your message effectively?

Exactly how much do ALT tags figure in to the Google algorithm” Who cares? That isn’t really important, unless you’re writing “for” a particular search engine, and you’re not. What’s important is that ALT tags need to be present on a well designed web page for human consumption. Write well for humans, and the search engines will follow.

Anyway, I’ve continued to recommend ALT tags, and I still use them on every webpage that I build to this day, and I’ve never been sorry that I did. You can read the inspiration for this post on the official Google Blog…