Using ALT attributes smartly

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Here’s the second of our video blog posts. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, provides
some useful tips on how to optimize the images you include on your site, and how simply providing
useful, accurate information in your ALT attributes can make your photos and pictures more
discoverable on the web. Ms Emmy Cutts also makes an appearance.

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Update: Some of you have asked about the difference between the alt and
title attributes. According to the W3C recommendations, the alt
attribute specifies an alternate text for user agents that cannot display images, forms or
applets. The title attribute is a bit different: it “offers advisory information
about the element for which it is set.” As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we
generally concentrate on the information provided in the alt attribute. You can
supplement the alt attribute with title and other attributes if they
provide value to your users!