Question concerning alt text

accidentel keyword spamming

[Weblamer]

Hello folks,

I noticed that on one of my sites I have a little blue graphical bullet. There are like 6 of these on the page. On each bullet I have one of my keywords worked into it. Say my keyword was appple. The bullets alt text are listed as: Apple category: red, Apple categorY crabapples, Apple category: sweet, and so one.

would this me considered a form of keyword spamming?

-ed

[TWhalen]

No, that would not be considered spamming.
Most engines dont even use text in the ALT tags anyway.
If you did that 100 times on the page, maybe, but definitely not for 6 of them.

[topr8]

alt text definition [w3.org]

yes it is spamming.

now wether a search engine penalises for it or not today is one thing - but what about tommorow???

[agerhart]

Let's not let this turn into a definition of spam thread, because it will run on for days without coming to any conclusions. If you wanted to look up definitions, I am sure you could find one that deemed SEO as spamming, and creating title tags to target keywords as spamming.

Using ALT tags in the way that you specified Weblamer will be perfectly fine. When creating tags of this nature where this type of question comes up, think of having your site reviewed by an editor at Yahoo, or a human review at Google. Will they look at these tags and think, "Wait a minute......."? Try to stay reasonable when creating these tags, and keep them short. A small button shouldn't have 4 lines of descriptive text.

[haryanto]

Will Google ban us for using the same keywords for ALT tags in ALL images in our site?
(e.g. if I sell tennis accessories do I get penalised for making all the ALT tags 'tennis accessories'?)
If they don't does this act improve the site ranking by maybe a little?

[TWhalen]

My answer was assuming that the ALT text for your bullet graphics was the same as the visible text after each bullet. (nice and short)

If its only 2-3 words as you say, it will be fine.
If it was 4 lines of text (as agerhart said) then I would steer away from doing it.