Pssst! Use both alt and title attributes on images...

I have always thought using alt images for images was good for seach engines. Now I come to learn that originally, the alt tag was solely intended display text in the absence of an image. IE displays alt text as a tooltip while many other browsers do not. So I got to thinking, why not take advantage of this and use both attributes in img tags but use differenent keyword enriched content for each one? Is this a good strategy?

Yup. It's a very good idea. Especially because you can make the alt-text slightly bot-friendly and the title-text more human-visitor-friendly. I say "slightly" because the alt attribute is - of course - not meant to be spammed with keywords.

Hey, its nice to know I am catching on to something. I am discovering that all those "dirty" little tricks really aren't necessary if a site is designed proplery. Oh, and what makes alt tags more bot friendly?

I have spent three hours on a search term suggestion tool getting variations of keyword phrases for a web site I am doing. The site is a business in Tuscany Italy that offers three services, cooking classes, villa rental, and b&b accommodations. My strategy for the home page is for such phrases as holiday, vacation, italy, tuscany, etc. Then inside, I will optimize pages for specific things like villa rental, cooking classes, etc. Here is what I have for the first page, am I on track?

<title>Tuscany Vacation - Italy Vacation - Tasty Tuscany Italian Cooking School</title>
<meta name="description" content="Vacation in Tuscany Italy - Learn to cook in Tuscany Italy Cooking School Classes - Stay at a tuscan vacation rental villa that was an Italian farmhouse." />
<meta name="keywords" content="Italy, Italian, Tuscany, Tuscan, tuscany vacation, italy vacation, vacation, holiday, travel, tuscany holidays, farmhouse in tuscany, europe vacation, family vacation, italian italy, italy holiday, italy tourism, italy vacation travel, trip to italy, holidays in italy, italian travel, travel italy, romantic vacation, farmhouse tuscany, holiday in tuscany, tuscany travel, information tuscany, european vacation, europe, european, vacation package, all inclusive vacation, vacation home, travel vacation, holiday, holiday adventure, holiday travel" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

Well - if you choose one to make rather "keyword dense", make it the ALT text. That's because the TITLE attributes are shown as tool tips all the time, so they lend themselves to slightly longer, descriptive texts. Alt attributes can take the slightly shorter, optimised phrases. Note (again): optimised =/= spammy.

Another reason to concentrate your SEO efforts on alt instead of title attributes is that Google (for one) doesn't read title attributes. So you'll need keyword-dense alt-attributes on your image links to please googlebot.

I've read suggsetions that it is no longer necessary to have lots of keyword combinations. A simple list of single keywords should suffice. Especially since your keywords list is very long and it will be impossible to optimise your home page for all those phrases anyway. Pick a few and save the other keywords for your inner pages (which - of course - should have their own distinctive meta tags and title element).

Why the robots tag? Don't you want Google to index your home page or follow links to your inner pages?

The page is on my development server and I don't want it indexed until I redirect tastytuscany . com to the new site. Make sense? Then I will change to follow/index. Insofar as the keywords, I am continually challenged by this. I've read tutorial after tutorial on the subject but still get a bit perplexed. For example, lets look at this site I am doing. On the home page, I want to attract people who are querying a search engine to vacation/holiday in Tuscany Italy. At the most basic level, what would you put? When you put in a phrase such as "italy vacation", is it then not neccessary to put in the words italy and vacation by themselves - such as content="italy, vacation, italy vacation" That is what confuses me. Take it a bit further and how about "vacation in italy, italy vacation, italy, vacation" Thanks for any clarification on this. God how I wish I could just sit down and pick the brain of a person like you for about an hour - or two... ;-) Take care.

Personally I'd have the home page relating to a restricted set of keywords and would probably use "italy,vacation,holiday" as the keywords. Some, if not all, search engines will ignore the 'in' and treat it as a stop word.

Cheers

John

Most engines dont read META tags so you should focus more on your content than the "keywords","content" tags.

Focus each page on only 2 or 3 major terms.

When using the ALt's and Title's - be sure to acurately describe your target pages....

This way it's not viewed as spam -

Try to acurately describe your image and it's target....