I'm pretty happy with the way I rank in searches and ever since I read about using the "alt" function when uploading pics to get more visitors I've made sure to use it to describe the photo I'm attaching I've done it religiously.

But maybe I'm not doing it right because I can rank good for a web search but if I switch over and look at the images for the web search I don't see the accompanying image in the post.

So what am I doing wrong?

Are you suppose to put the keywords in parenthesis, separate them with commas, both, or one or the other? Or what is the trick involved here?

The alt attribute isn't about keywords. You're supposed to put text that describes the image, for people and software - like googlebot - that doesn't do images.

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

The alt attribute isn't about keywords. You're supposed to put text that describes the image, for people and software - like googlebot - that doesn't do images.

Exactly use the alt attribute to describe the function of each useful photograph or diagram. Then Google will find the images. You will find more information here on W3c.

I personally exclude image search from my site using robots.txt becuase the traffic was very bad and led to allot of hot linking but this was 4 years ago so I am thinking of re-introducing it. Is anyone in my position wanting to do the same?

its true that alt attribute really helps the image to get crawled by bots because they can't read images. I don't think it has something to do with your good ranking, maybe in visitors, but not in ranking.

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

The alt attribute isn't about keywords. You're supposed to put text that describes the image, for people and software - like googlebot - that doesn't do images.

I guess I wasn't clear.

Say I write a pot about a XYZ plant. My post about XYZ plant draws several visitors a day to my blog. In the post I add a picture of XYZ plant and in the atl section I put XYZ plant, How to Grow XYZ plant or how to water XYZ plant you get the idea.

What I am asking is there a way I'm suppose to add the text in the atl attribute to get image results visits?


XYZ plant Watering XYZ plant

XYZ plant, watering XYZ plant

"XYZ plant" "Watering XYZ plant"

"XYZ plant," "Watering XYZ plant"

The entry gets indexed well but the image doesn't- so I'm wondering if there is a standard way of writing the alt tags so that the bots can read and index the image?

The standard way of writing alt attributesis standardized: use regular English, or whatever language your site is written in. There's no such thing as an alt tag in all of HTML, but the attribute is meant for blind people who use screen readers, not for SEO.

Appropriate alt attributes and a caption near the image seems to work well.

http://www.qwertysqoncepts.com/2007/...izations-sake/

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...howtopic=27059

Interesting links, Chris. Does anyone know where this came from, in the first one?

A good rule of thumb is to use 1 word for every 16×40 slice of an image. So, if the image is 50×100 pixels, you can use (50/16) * (100/40) = 6 words.

Math in SEO always seems funny to me. That's an awefully precise rule.

it came Lisa Barone (Bruce Clay) ( http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archiv...igns_goog.html )

So given the source make of it what you will

Google Images is mysterious, but good. They send about 200 people a day to my site, and don't seem to index that many of my photos. The results on that page are pretty strange, at least not what I would expect. Although the first is one of the better ones.

I've never linked to any of the jpegs; only the pages they live on. Other people have linked directly to the image, but I've got my .htaccess set to redirect these links to one of my galleries.

Use descriptive file names. Do the same things you would do to try and make a page come up in a search. Use the alt and title attributes, but use them to describe what's in the image. They're not only there for blind people, but it's a decent rule of thumb to imagine a blind person or turn images off in your browser.

And forget keywords for the most part.

yeh a lot of people dont protect their image gallerys from the search engines. personally i have it in my robots.txt file not to crawl that directory. i had all my graphics custom made, so the lass people that se and have the opportunity to see and steel them, i block that file

It's painful to have an image stolen, but you can make that more difficult without hiding your images from Google. People have stolen my images twice, that I know of, but giving access to the search engines brings an awful lot more people to see them in the way I had intended. I want people to see mine, so search traffic seems like a good risk vs payoff.

You have to put the text that describes the image in the search box...alternate attributes can not find those images ...