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!