I thought its would better to make optimization and not to irritate
visitors with emerging tooltips. On this example, IE users cannot see
a tooltips for an image (the alt tag is empty), but what Google
indexes better, should I replace discription back to the alt
attribute?
I know some people uses both title and alt attributes, but can it be
lead to negative consequences, such as Googlebot consider it as spam?
I would like to use just one attribute.
I'll just copy & paste something from a blog post we made a while
back:
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. Feel free to supplement
the "alt" attribute with "title" and other attributes if they provide
value to your users!
- http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-alt-attribut...
So for example, if you have an image of a puppy (these seem popular at
the moment :-)) playing with a ball, you could use something like "My
puppy Betsy playing with a bowling ball" as the alt-attribute for the
image. If you also have a link around the image, pointing a large
version of the same photo, you could use "View this image in high-
resolution" as the title attribute for the link.
In other words, the title-attribute is to provide information about
the *link* (what's going to happen when I click here?), the alt-
attribute is to provide an alternative to the *image* (what is this
image about?).
> I'll just copy & paste something from a blog post we made a while
> back:
> 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. Feel free to supplement
> the "alt" attribute with "title" and other attributes if they provide
> value to your users!
> -http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-alt-attribut...
> So for example, if you have an image of a puppy (these seem popular at
> the moment :-)) playing with a ball, you could use something like "My
> puppy Betsy playing with a bowling ball" as the alt-attribute for the
> image. If you also have a link around the image, pointing a large
> version of the same photo, you could use "View this image in high-
> resolution" as the title attribute for the link.
> In other words, the title-attribute is to provide information about
> the *link* (what's going to happen when I click here?), the alt-
> attribute is to provide an alternative to the *image* (what is this
> image about?).
The alt attribute can actually be much longer than 3 words. They say
that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I wouldn't quite go that
far :). At any rate, more than three words is certainly fine. Make it
a simple description without going too far to describe alternatives of
alternatives.
For instance, in the example I mentioned above, using "puppie playing
with ball, dog playing with toy, small dog, pet toy, play ball, cute
puppie, betsie puppie with ball, cheap dog toys, pet toys, animal
food, animal care, pet care, puppie care, puppie toys" would be going
a bit tooo far (not to mention that it would scare users away if they
saw it).
> The alt attribute can actually be much longer than 3 words. They say
> that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I wouldn't quite go that
> far :). At any rate, more than three words is certainly fine. Make it
> a simple description without going too far to describe alternatives of
> alternatives.
> For instance, in the example I mentioned above, using "puppie playing
> with ball, dog playing with toy, small dog, pet toy, play ball, cute
> puppie, betsie puppie with ball, cheap dog toys, pet toys, animal
> food, animal care, pet care, puppie care, puppie toys" would be going
> a bit tooo far (not to mention that it would scare users away if they
> saw it).
