Keywords in image alt text helpful?

Quick question about AlltheWeb ranking

[mpthink]

Hi people

I would be grateful if someone could tell me whether placing a keyword in the image <alt> tags helps ranking for for that keyword on AlltheWeb?
If so do you think repeating the keyword would incur penalties?

I would appreciate any insight anyone has on this!

Cheers

[Marketing Guy]

I think repeating the keyword should incur penalties, but you may get away with it.

Personally I think you should stick writing accurate ALT tag descriptions. At the end of the day your site will be related to the image so most will have your keyword in them anyway.

MG

[mpthink]

Marketing Guy,

Just to clarify, I wasn't talking about stuffing, more the repetition in separate alt tags.

But I was mostly interested to know whether AlltheWeb actually took any notice of alt tags and whether its ranking algorithm took their content into account.

Cheers,

Mpthink

[Rumbas]

ATW puts weight on ALT/TITLE-img tags. Use it once on a image near the top of the pages and you should be fine. No need to over do it.

[edited by: Rumbas at 2:37 pm (utc) on Jan. 23, 2003]

[Marcia]

I've seen a page that has about 16 product photos of the same item in different styles - like silk widgets, burlap widgets, linen widgets, etc. Each of the alt tags has the corresponding phrase, which is technically accurate but doesn't really look right being that repetitious. That can happen a lot with product dislay pages, and even with graphics sites displaying thumbnail images. Any thoughts on whether that could create problems?

[georgeek]

I would be grateful if someone could tell me whether placing a keyword in the image <alt> tags helps ranking for for that keyword on AlltheWeb?

In my opinion it is very important to do this. I cannot prove that it helps in the ranking but if I had to bet on it I would say that it does. Do a search on your keyword(s) and then look at the 'Multimedia Results' 'X Pictures found'. Look at the top 9 in detail and I would be very surprised if you find any without the keyword in the <alt> tag.

[martinibuster]

In using alt tags always keep in mind that you are doing this for accessibility reasons. That is what they are for.

They are not for "tricking" a search engine.