encyclo - 8:48 pm on Jul 29, 2008 (gmt 0)

Using alt text does have an influence, but it's a poor substitute for simply displaying the same text on-screen in a paragraph rather than hidden via an alt attribute. The search engines benefit in both cases, but when using standard text then all your users benefit too.

So my argument remains that keyword-stuffing the alt attribute is sub-optimal compared to adapting the design to allow for image-plus-text - when dealing with "meaningful" images, not decorative ones. Think newspaper/magazine photo captioning, put the image title in a hx element above and the caption below.