6 replies to this topic

[anne999]

First, I'll just say that I'm a newbie at this, so I hope I aske the question clearly. The internal links between my site pages are based on images (for example, the "About Us" page includes the image AboutUs.jpg) when I review the source code on the landing page for linking to the About page. If I add an ALT tag to each of the images for the respective page links, will the link be considered anchor text? In other words, if I add an ALT tag "Toronto car sales" to the AboutUs.jpg image, will "Toronto car sales" be considered the link anchor text? The About Us page is optimized for Toronto car sales and contains "Toronto car sales" as the title in h1.

Thanks,
Anne

[Jill]

First, it's "alt attribute" not "alt tag" (before chrishirst comes in screaming!)

Second, yes, it's fine to use your anchor text in a descriptive alt attribute rather than it being text link. Works basically the same.

[anne999]

First, it's "alt attribute" not "alt tag" (before chrishirst comes in screaming!)

Second, yes, it's fine to use your anchor text in a descriptive alt attribute rather than it being text link. Works basically the same.

Thanks Jill, I'm still on a steep learning curve. I appreciate the advice.

Anne

[Robmuller]

In my experience an anchor text is more effective than the alt attribute. With my own site I changed all picture links to text links and it resulted in more traffic. By the way, this is also valid for external links: better use a descriptive text link (e.g. an anchor text reading "new york hotels" deep links to a page that is about hotels in new york) than a banner with an alt attribute.

[Jill]

In my experience an anchor text is more effective than the alt attribute. With my own site I changed all picture links to text links and it resulted in more traffic.

And that's the only thing you changed?

Did your rankings go up for the specific words in the anchor text?
Did you have the exact same text links as you previously had in your alt attributes for the images?
Did the structure of your site change as well, when you want to all text links?

[mal4mac]

Why not use both? Both seem useful to the user, one providing the immediate impact of the company logo, the other providing a textual description. If both happen to be the same (i.e. the company name!) could you not make the text link part of your navigation panel? That would, surely, get you more visitors *and* be useful. People might not think of clicking on the image, but they would use the navigation panel. People might not recognise that you are *the* "Universal Widgets" unless you have your flashy logo.

In summary, wouldn't having both a text link and image *always* be useful?

Having said that, wouldn't Google tend to favour text links, because they are *more* useful? That is "text = navigation" in the user's mind, but a logo does not? So Rob Muller's observations make sense to me.

But did the traffic increase because the search engines like text links more, or because users like text links more, or both?

But now the experiment to try is to put the logo on your pages *as well*. Surely?

The only argument against that is that it might be looked at as "over optimization". But my "both are useful" argument would seem to mitigate against that. Wouldn't it?

Is over-optimization really an issue anyway? Surely *bad optimization* is what any sensible search firm would act against? That is, stuffing fifty keywords into an alt attribute should get you banned, but having keywords in every place that is useful to the user should (at worst) have no effect, and just might give you the edge. Or is my reasoning faulty?

[Jill]

Is over-optimization really an issue anyway? Surely *bad optimization* is what any sensible search firm would act against?

Correct. There's no such thing as "over-optimization" since to be optimized is to be perfect. You can't be more than perfect.