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Is leaving the name and alt attributes of the img tag a "ne faux pas"
with regards to the SEs? are they still deducting points for this?
As for points, I don't know anything about this, but anything that helps the spiders crawl through your site is good.
Anything that can confuse them (bad html), may cause them to record your html as text, or stop crawling altogether. I've seen badly coded sites that are only half crawled and partly indexed, and I attributed this to their badly coded html.
It's a pain sometimes to make it validate. I gotta do a little work on my own site...
On a side note, I created a web page that used small gifs as bullets. In the alt text I put "decorative bullet" After a while I began to notice in my logs that people with bullet as a word in their google searches were coming to my page. So I decided to replace the "decorative bullet" alt text with relevant keywords instead.
Alt tags are processed by search engines, and this element is one of the important ones like <H_> tags.
An Alt Tag is an attribute not an element. Although they are still valid there is generally little weight in association.
Title attribute may be a better choice... and it is a valid element attribute >> title="".
title attributes can also be used to define links, objects, tables, rows, cells, etc., or basically anything that has dimension.
If image is also a link use title="" in link and alt="" in the image. In this context the alt="" will display on mouseover by default.
An Alt Tag is an attribute not an element.ALT is not a tag :)
creative_craig,
there's no a a preferred method: ALT and TITLE are designed for different purposes. The fist one is for alternative text that should be displayed when image is not loaded (or graphics is turned off, or for text browsers), the second one is for displaying hint messages (or whatever you call them) when you point your cursor over them.
You see ALTs being displayed as "hints" in NN4 and all IE versions (on Windows only!), but it's not the way it should be according standards.
Also, TITLE attribute is applicable to almost any page element: block-level elements, links, even different form elements.
We should always attempt to use proper terminology.
Slang can get people in trouble if they "think they understand, but don't".
We should always attempt to use proper terminology.
IMHO, this is so true. In our business, details matter.
On a side note, I created a web page that used small gifs as bullets. In the alt text I put "decorative bullet" After a while I began to notice in my logs that people with bullet as a word in their google searches were coming to my page. So I decided to replace the "decorative bullet" alt text with relevant keywords instead.
Someone with a text browser or with images turned off will then see all those words in place of the small, tidy bullet. I'm occasionally forced to surf without images (slow connection) and a long alt tag in place of a small bullet can make the bulleted list unreadable. It's even worse for someone with a browser such as JAWS (ie one which reads the page out loud) as they will have to listen to either 'decorative bullet' or whatever else you have there spoken out loud before every list item.
From a usability view point it's better to use a replacement for the bullet point, i.e. something like * or that little ascii dot. Then, while not everyone will see the decorative version, everyone will be able to access the information contained in the list. I can see how the extra keywords words may bring more traffic, so I guess it depends on what kind of audience your site attracts.
