Ask Marketing Experts search engine marketing forum

[Max]

:D
If I have an image (gif or jpg) that is a hyperlink, can the spiders follow that and does having the ìaltî as part of the image tag help give relevance to your web site for getting listed for search engines?

Thanks for your help.

Max

[7thDsites]

Hi Max,

The spiders do follow the image links, but as far as getting keyword reputation and the true link benefits No.
It best to use keyword rich text links to your sites and to your individual pages.
The alt tag isn't going to help you whereas the link is concerned.

best,
john

[admin]

[quote:d8e35fe4e0="Max"]
If I have an image (gif or jpg) that is a hyperlink, can the spiders follow[/quote:d8e35fe4e0]
yes, spiders follow all hyperlinks

[quote:d8e35fe4e0="Max"]
does having the ìaltî as part of the image tag help give relevance to your web site for getting listed for search engines?
[/quote:d8e35fe4e0]

Search engines used to index the image "alt" tag, but google now does not include this in their algorithm, most likely because of misuse. They DO use it however for their image search.

[maartenvr]

IMO the alt tag does halp a tin bit. Text around links on a page gives the search engine spider an indication what the page is about. wether the link is relevant to the content or not. So it does not hurt using alt tags. But keep it simple. don't just throw a whole bunch of keywords in there.

[7thDsites]

Iíve had some good luck in the SEs using the alt tags, or so it would seem, when I use sentences containing KWs; for instance, alt="Image of happy people that are reciprocally linking their web sites."

By doing this I can squeeze in some of the keywords I need as well as provide a place for some "other words" that will help to "water down" the overall keyword density if need be. I generally go over the "good zone" when it comes to the KW density and have to do some watering down. Do use sentences though and Don't underestimate the spiders; they can differentiate between sentences and a bunch of words in a row. The alt="links, linking, reciprocal linking, blah, blah, blah" quit working years ago.

IMO people will generally use images that have something to do with their site or that ties in with the content. So by defining the image in a similiar context you can get some benefit even if the SEs like Google are indexing solely for their image search results.