Banner link Vs. text link

Are banner links worth anything in terms of SE's?

[stinky]

Many of my clients web sites (in my industry) link to my site with one of my banners. The banners do Not have any "alt" tags, but they are linked directly to my site with a regular html link. Are these banner links worth anything in terms of the SERPS for my site? How do SE's determine what kind of credit to give banner links if they do not have any anchor text/ alt tags?

[justdave]

Yes, all links count for something. You might try contacting the sites using your banners and asking them if they would consider adding an alt tag. A lot of them will do it.

[Ace1]

Banners have no SEO benefit. Simple.

[martinibuster]

Actually Ace, it's a link. As long as it isn't redirected and is hard coded <a href="foo.com"><img src="foo.gif"></a>

A link counts as a vote. Link analysis is about counting votes and analyzing anchor text.

[Dj_Apx]

So the best SEO solution would be :
<a href="foo.com">
<img src="foo.gif" alt="Foo.com, the best retailer on Earth for whateverisyourproduct!"><br />
Foo.com, the best retailer on Earth for whateverisyourproduct!
</a>

Is that so?

[Conard]

Not quite.
The best solution would be to drop all image links in favor of a good text link.
If for some reason you have to have an image link then what you listed in better than no link at all, a little better any way.

[theceo]

make it a title tag

alt tag is bad code in IE, it was not meant to be used like it is

title is the right tag

[Dj_Apx]

Well, since the websites i may get links from are mostly banner-users, i still need to give them banners!

But isn't

<a href="foo.com"> 
<img src="foo.gif" title="Foo.com, the best retailer on Earth for whateverisyourproduct!">
</a>
<br /> 
<a href="foo.com"> 
Foo.com, the best retailer on Earth for whateverisyourproduct! 
</a>

isn't that too much? Two successive links for the same page on the same page?

[martinibuster]

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but the title element describes the link, and the alt text describes text that may be in the image for the benefit of sight impaired surfers and for those user agents that cannot render images (i.e. bots and text browsers).

[edited by: martinibuster at 12:29 am (utc) on Feb. 19, 2005]

[2_much]

It definitely helps, especially if the site is categorical (for Google). For Yahoo and MSN, anchor text is so important that it has less value, but it does count as a vote.

[theceo]

most people incorrectly use alt to pop mouseover text, title is the correct way to pop the mouse over

as to SE's, images aren't that import to text bots right, so most probably ignore alt text since it's not relevant to the text of the page

the only reason alt works like it does was a bug in an early IE browsers

what happens one day when IE fixes it?

anyway, we use title now in all text links and also images

a lot of early surfers had images turned off to save bandwidth, but most now surf with images on, so alt is kinda useless most of the time

the text is so small in those pops I don't see anyone with sight problems reading it, the original reason for alt was to display some text for people not viewing images on the net

how many people you know that do that now?

very very few, yet 10 years ago it was big enough percentage, today no one designs for people looking at modern web pages filled with rich media content with image off in their browsers

maybe a few do

but alt is bad html

[martinibuster]

...the text is so small in those pops I don't see anyone with sight problems reading it...The original reason for alt was to display some text for people not viewing images on the net...

Hehe, not really but an interesting guess. ;)

The alt text is for hardware and software used by the sight impaired (i.e. blind) that reads the alt text (or generates braille text) so they know that a gif image on a navbar says, HOME, etc. Afaik, the alt text was conceived primarily for web accessibility reasons.

You can read more about it here:
[w3.org...]

Contrary to what you may believe, I have seen enough instances where alt text has played a role in ranking a website that it's beyond doubt. You shouldn't form an opinion on something like this based upon your reasoning without having empirical data to back it up.

But don't take my word for it, here is what Google's own Webmaster Guidelines [google.com] has to say about it:

Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.