I have been practising on my own site.  When I add an alt img tag I still cannot see the text when I scroll over the image.  I don’t understand this, could you please help? My URL is [URL removed for privacy reasons]. There is no alt img tag at present (I took it out because it didn’t seem to work).

Thanks in advance and regards,

Barry

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Hi Barry

If you’re using Firefox, you won’t see alt tags when you mouseover. But if you right click on the image with your mouse and view *properties*, you should see your alt text in the alt field.

Or you could just view your site in Internet Explorer where the mouseovers should work fine.

Regardless of which browser you use, search engines will be able to index your alt tags. Plus text to speech software will be able to read them for visually-impaired visitors, so you should include them wherever possible for site usability purposes.

How do we get around the ‘Top Banner’ image alt tag problem?

I have just read how important it is to have page-content specific titles….what about our site banner?

Even if I use text with a css background-image for the Site Name….it’s still the same on every page!!

Does the use of the H1 tag on each page being different solve this problem?

Thanks
Paul

Dear Paul,

When incorporating keywords into your website, relevance is the most important thing. If you sell ‘blue widgets’ and on your website you have a picture of a ‘blue widget’ (not that I really know what one of those would look like, but just work with me here…) it would be relevant to use the words ‘blue widget’ in your image alt text.

But if you were to have an image of a cow (not that I know why you’d have an image of a cow on a ‘blue widget’ website) I’d advise against using the image alt tag ‘blue widget’ because it’s not relevant to the image.

The same applies to your top banner.

Obviously the top banner is the same on each page and I could imaging your banner would probably contain images, perhaps your logo and maybe even a tag-line or text pertaining to your business.

So use alt image text that would pertain to the banner – put the company name and tag-line or core product in there, but don’t try and cram it with keywords.

Using unique title tags, headings (H1, H2 etc.) and content has far more weight from an SEO perspective than the image alt tags, so if you do this well, you’ll have nothing to fear by having the same alt text for your top banner.

Hope this helps!

Peter Newsome
SiteMost SEO Brisbane

Do search engines recognize words that are in a graphic? My home page is loaded with graphics and I have been told that search engines cannot read them. Is that true? I am about to have my home page rebuilt and I don’t want to spend the money if I don’t have to.

Al

View my video answer below: