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December 19, 2008

Poll: SEOs Say Alt Attribute Does Improve Search Rankings

SEO & Alt TagsA few weeks ago I ran a poll asking does the alt tag improve rankings in search engines. We have now received over a hundred responses from our readers, who I assume are mostly SEOs.

About 80% said, yes, using an alternative attribute on images does indeed help improve rankings. While about 20% said it does not.

Here is the breakdown:
:: Alt Tag improves rankings said 86 respondents or 79.63%
:: Alt Tag does NOT improve rankings said 22 respondents or 20.37%

With most these polls, sometimes people look too much into the question. I am surprised about 20% said no.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.



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posted rustybrick in Search Engine Optimization at December 19, 2008 8:21 AM Comments (4)

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Comments

i have not put it to the test, but i must! i guess it is good practice to always use alt but sometimes it just gets forgotton about

 

Posted by diarmuid ryan at December 21, 2008 14:06

I can understand the possibility of it not helping the page overall. I disagree, I believe it does help, but I can understand it. However, it absolutely must help the image and image searches/results. And in the age of Universal Search Results your images need to be as optimized as possible so those ALT tags better be good.

 

Posted by Scot at December 22, 2008 11:48

I agree it depends... for image search it is important... for link text it's useless... and I strongly doubt it is weighted for organic. That's the problem with general polls on SEO techniques. I bet if you excluded universal it would be the opposite result.

 

Posted by Terry Van Horne at December 22, 2008 14:00

alt-Tags are one of several "small screws" that can be adjusted while optimizing onpage! having keywords in your alt-tags makes seo-measures complete! Not to forget that alt-tags really help in getting your images into googleImages-searchresults, which may bring some more traffic together with organic serp traffic....

 

Posted by Nicos at December 30, 2008 08:05

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