|
womble -> RE: Alt Tags For Endcaps? (11/25/2009 10:04:17)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: SEOMarketer
but alt tags help in seo
They help very little in SEO. The search engines got wise to black hat SEO scammers stuffing them full of keywords. Fill an alt attribute with rubbish or repeat the same phrase over and over again in alt attributes and you're likely to really annoy someone who relies on the alt text to make sense of a page, and most likely not do yourself any favours with the search engines either.
Alt attribute text should be used for briefly describing an image only, and nothing else. Screenreader users rely on them, and if your images don't load for any reason, visitors will at least have an idea what the images should be showing.
Unless you're using an image for image replacement, in which case alt text will only be useful if your actual heading text is off-screen, as Dave says, repeating the same phrase twice is pointless. If you're using an image replacement technique where the heading text is hidden by the image, the screenreader user will still get the heading text read to them from the <Hn> tag, so don't need the alt text. If images don't load or CSS support is off then the actual text will show instead. If your text's way off the screen by 9999px or whatever though using the alt attribute is wise. Though screenreader users will still get the text read to them even if it's way off screen, and if CSS in disabled just the plain text will show anyway, if CSS is on but images are off or don't load properly, a visitor will get a blank space unless you've included some meaningful alt text.
Personally I can't see a reason why endcaps should need any alt text, because as Dave said, they're purely decorative images. Save yourself the typing (and the few extra bytes of data that could make all the difference to your load times [;)]) and just leave empty alt attributes - it'll validate just fine. As long as alt="" is there the validator doesn't care whether there's anything between the quote marks.
|
|
|
|
