Importance Of Alt Tags In SEO

Alt tags (Alternative tags) are assigned to your images in case either someone does not want to download pictures or for some reason cannot download images. In place of the image will be the alt tag. You can also see an alt tag by moving your mouse over an image. Alt tags are also a good idea because there is quite a bit of evidence to point towards the search engines placing some value on having them, although it should be pointed out that trying to manipulate them by stuffing a heap of meaningless keywords into them will probably be a very bad thing to do.

Quite a few sites out there have alt tags 25 words long which is clearly ridiculous, and its surprising that they would think the search engines would be so naive as to be tricked by something like this.

It reminds me of a skit from a great show called 3rd rock from the sun. Dick Solomon was having to do his tax return and having an awful time of it when he had a brainstorm, he decided to claim a Cessna light aircraft on his tax return, he then spent the next 3 minutes boasting about how easily it was to fool the tax department, and how stupid the human race was, that was just before he got a knock at the door from the auditor....

This is a good analogy because it shows that when you are unfamiliar with something it is easy to believe that you can outsmart it. The best thing to remember here is that whatever crazy scheme you can think up about fooling the search engines, many thousands have already thought about it, and the search engines are now sophisticated enough to flag obvious manipulation tactics.