Re: Google and alt tags

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003 19:08:37 +0100, "Shongwe"
<shongwe (AT) NONntlworldSPAM (DOT) com> wrote:

I've recently finished a website and am thinking about SEO for the first
time and it's making my head fuzzy!

I used PhotoShop a lot to design my site, and spliced the resulting 'image'
into lots of small images which I then saved as images+html and exported to
dreamweaver. The text/rollovers etc were added there.

I gave each of these small images (most of which appear across the banner)
an alt tag, thinking this was the thing to do.

Once the site was launched I tested it in those website that are supposed to
predict what your site will look like when it appears in Google. It seems
that Google, should it ever find my site (a whole different story it seems)
will feature the description as a row of alt tags. If I remove the alt tags
and test the page again, the description is based on the opening lines of
the text on my page, which I'm happy with.

Is there a way of having alt tags on images that sequentially appear before
the main text, without having Google pull them into the description? Or do I
need to remove all the alt tags off all my pages?

www.shongwelookout.com First page has no alt tags, remaining pages haven't
yet been stripped.

Many thanks in advance.

If what you're after is to have tooltips pop up, but not have the text
in the search engines, use the TITLE attribute instead of the ALT
attribute. You can use TITLE on more than just IMG tags, by the way.
Pretty much any tag can have a TITLE.

The proper use of the ALT attribute is to provide ALTernate text to be
displayed if the user agent can't or won't display an image. Some user
agents will display the ALT tag's contents as a tool-tip, but not all.
(http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#adef-alt)

The TITLE attribute is meant for such doo-dads as tooltips. AFAIK it's
supported by all browsers that aren't woefully in need of an update,
and will override the ALT attribute on those that do display ALT text
as tooltips. (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.4.3)