since firefox seems to ignore the alt attribute but both IE and FF are ok with the title attribute I changed all my alts to titles - my question is this; will this effect my search positioning as I'm told keywords in the alt carry some weight with the search spiders.

also whilst I'm on the same subject anyone know where I can find some sort of equation to work out how many links are required to obtain a certain PageRank?
I know there are many variables like link depth, refferer pagerank, number of links on a page etc. but an estimate would be nice.

Thanks folks

1. The easiest way to get round the problem is just do an 'alt' and 'title' tag on your images.

2. I don't know is the answer :P ...

1. not if you (a) have an insane number of images or (b) are as lazy as i am

i really just wanted to know if it had any effect on my search result placement.

2. me neither, hence my asking ;p

cheers anyway sdcdesign

anyone else care to have a crack at this one??

The keword weightage in alt tags is very low. But still since it have weigtage, if your contents keyword density is less, it may effect. So why not have both alt and titlle attributes.

Best place to look is the HTML Specifications. The ALT attribute is for ALTernative Text, i.e. what to make of the image for any user agent that can't 'see' an image (could be a blind person using text to speech, braille, or the Gogole bot).
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#h-13.8

The TITLE attribute is a bit less specific. "Values of the title attribute may be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways" so be wary of how you use this one.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/gl...tml#adef-title

If you ommit the "alt" tag, then your site will not be html validate, so use both tags.

Originally Posted by purk

since firefox seems to ignore the alt attribute but both IE and FF are ok with the title attribute I changed all my alts to titles [...]

Just to clarify, because a lot of people have the same misconception...

The ALT attribute is there for the use of alternate text for an image. This is used either when viewing a site with a text browser (i.e.: lynx) or when images fail to load. Some time back, MS and IE decided to make ALT text display on tooltips. However, this is not the original purpose or intent of the ALT attribute.

That's what the TITLE attribute is for.

Firefox isn't ignoring the ALT text, it's just not displaying the tooltip because that's not what the tag was meant to do.

Try http://www.googlerankings.com/ as an answer to your second quesion!

also whilst I'm on the same subject anyone know where I can find some sort of equation to work out how many links are required to obtain a certain PageRank?

nope.

1/ you have no idea what the real PR is of each page in your site
2/ You have no idea what the real PR is of the linking page.
3/ You only have the inaccurate and out of date Toolbar display to work from
4/ No one has any idea what will change from day to day on any page that has a link to your pages.

So any "tool" that purports to calculate future PR will be 90% guessology.

techwench,
You may be right, but if you want your pages to be html 4.0 validated, you have to use the "alt" tag. If you ommit this tag, you will get an error.

Ok, there seems to be a bit of an uncertainty about this question.

IE allows and displays alt because it is old hat, firefox does not because it is old hat.

The question has been answered, if you want your search engines to read your images then you must have the alt tag. Search engine spiders do not use firefox technology, so do not worry about an alt tag being shown in it. If you only use the title tag then your tag will be missed by a spider.

Originally Posted by JabezDesign

techwench,
You may be right, but if you want your pages to be html 4.0 validated, you have to use the "alt" tag. If you ommit this tag, you will get an error.

Um, that's not what I said.

The original poster said FF was ignoring the alt tags. I posted a clarification based on that statement, and that statement alone.