Hiding Image Alt Text

Hiding Image Alt Text

 

I recently co-authored a 3-part series on keyword strategy for Search Engine News. The last article covered keyword placement, and one of the places (though far down on the list) we recommended putting your keywords was in your image alt text.

Most might scoff at the idea of keywords in image alt text effecting a page's search engine rank, but I can tell you definitively that I have seen pages which had almost no content rank highly for fairly competitive keywords based entirely on image alt text keywords. Stuff enough of them in there, and you're going to rank.

One drawback to placing keywords in image alt text is that those keywords are visible to anyone who places their mouse over the image (actually, this is the case with IE, but not with Firefox, which shows the text in the title attribute). This isn't a big deal if you're just using a short descriptive phrase (the way alt text is intended to be used), but if you're packing that thing full of keywords, then it's going to look pretty weird. Shouldn't there be some easy way to hide image alt text from mouseovers?

Actually, there is. All you need to do is add a blank title attribute to the image tag. It's as simple as that. For example, let's take the following cute public domain image approximation of the Linux penguin and stuff it with keywords related to this article:

<img src="http://www.esoos.com/images/linux.png" alt="hide keywords in image alt text, etc..., etc..." style="float: left; padding-right: 4px;" height="128" width="107">

I could actually stuff a lot more keywords in here, but I don't actually want to engage in spam. Rather, I'm just showing you what can be done so you're aware of what to look out for, and conscious of the lines you can and cannot cross.

Notice that if you mouse over the image in Internet Explorer, you can see the image alt text in a tooltip pop-up.

Contrast that with the following image:

<img src="http://www.esoos.com/images/linux.png" title="" alt="hide keywords in image alt text, etc..., etc..." style="float: left; padding-right: 4px;" height="128" width="107">

Alt tag with keywords is still there, but I've added the title="" attribute. This effectively suppresses the tooltip popup. Just be sure not to leave any space between the quotes, or you'll get a tiny little pop-up.

Now that we've established that you can pack your alt text with keywords and keep it hidden from your users, the questions is: should you? And the answer would be: no, you really shouldn't.

Granted it does work, but you're asking for trouble. Search engines catch you doing something like this and chances are good it's going to hurt your site. Most likely the search engines will never catch you on their own, but you can be sure that one of your competitors will be more than happy to file a spam report on you once you start to outrank them.

Besides, it's really too easy to simply work your keywords into some visible text on your page, which is just as effective (actually more so), and you don't need to keep yourself up at night worrying if someone's going to turn you in. If you want some great advice on how to work your keywords into your site in a natural way, I recommend you either subscribe to Search Engine News or pick up Jill Whalen's Nitty-Gritty Guide to Writing for Search Engines.

A bit of descriptive text in your image alt text is a good thing. But going overboard with keyword stuffing is risky. Still, now that you know how it works, you'll be able to spot it when you see it.