Picture alttag VS HTML text?

Hi all,

I've been lazy...
Anyone ever tried to compare these two situations:
have a page with htlm text and then the same page with the same text but as an alt tag and not as html.

Does it really affect your ranking if you decide to use a picture with text on it (for pure design purposes) rather than html text?

Thaks for your opinion and i salute all of you for participating and sharing. ;)

Tchouzy

IMO nothing beats good old plain HTML text. I am not sure if anyone has actually demonstrated that ALT tag is any good unless if you are using pictures that are likely to bring you visitors from image search.

raz

^^thats right.. but you can also use image... site design also makes a difference.. and use alt attributes for those images...

A somewhat realted question: On my site, I want to have a simple slideshow of 5 - 10 images that just rotate through every few seconds. I'd like to have them clickable and linked to relavant conent on my site, and most of all, I'd like to give them "alt" type tags so that the search engines will pick them up and index them in image search results. I'm a newbie to a lot of this stuff. I've used javascript slideshow / marquis type code before, but I need to know how google will treat it.

Could any one offer some insight? Thanks a million!

Paul

I will stick to pure html, a little less design friendly but the positives outdo the negatives

Paul, im sure you can put alt tags on your images but don't waste too much time on it. IMO it will not affect your rankings that much.

It's been well documented that Google likes static HTML text a hell of a lot. Might as well just stick to that instead of risking other forms of content.

Alt tags do little with regards to SERPs.

They're certainly NOT the difference between life and death, as some of my mates believe.

Yes, I concur with what you've both said about static text being Google's favorite. I've already achieved rather respectable search engine results with pages made up of flash based galleries embedded into HTML pages that have just a little bit of relevant text. It's simple, but Google likes my site pretty well.

You see, I'm a photographer, and I photograph some people who get searched for alot online (some big name musicians), and I'd like my photos of them to come up in the Google image search results. As it stands now, my images are all held in these flash galleries and as such, Google ignores them. I am looking at having my images indexed as the next level in improving my sites SE performance - hence my interest in a way to create a simple slideshow that Google can "read".

Any thoughts?

- paul

If the image slideshow (and alt tags/links) are embedded in JS I don't think Google will register either the alt tags or the links.

I have seen a site with nothing but pics with alt tags own the #1 spot for a very competitive serp in Google.
I can't be 100% sure it was the alt tags of course (it could have simply been backlink strength) but he had very few links!

...just a quick note to say that IMO you can't do too much for the engines. Remember that Alt Tags are picked up by screen readers so are +ve from an Accessibility point of view. Hot potatoe at the moment and remember that google (et al) have some pretty complex algoriths too...can't do too much to help them if you ask me!

I have always used alt tags, not stuffing them but using them as they were ment to be used, to describe an image that may have failed to load for one reason or another.

My images usually come up in google image search and we get quite a bit of traffic from that alone. I can not be sure if this is because we use the image alt tags.

There are more and more ways to view a web site for example hand held telephones, various browsers and so forth and some of these may not parse the html as well as others.

For that reason am converting everything to xhtml, starting with 1.0 transitional, if for no other reason than to make the code cleaner and plug the holes or mistakes in my bad html. Making sure that my alt, title and summary tags are present and used properly is part of this process.

I do not see how using alt tags can hurt, unless I were to stuff them with useless garbage.