Anchor Text vs. Alt Text?

Hello

I’m a web designer and I have a powerby to my website on all my clients websites. See following:

powered by <a href=“www.mylink.com” alt=“new York web design”>my company name</a>

Should I do the following instead:
powered by <a href=“www.mylink.com” alt=“new York web design”>New York Web Design</a>

My question are:

  1. Does alt text help Seo at all?
  2. Is using targeted keywords on the anchor text significantly effective in my case? Anyone has the experiences in doing so?

Thank you for any help you have

Having the same anchor text in too many IBLs can hurt you but google aren’t stupid and recognise there are exceptions to this rule such as your referral links and links in an add-on or plug-in/template etc etc. The links probably won’t help much since they won’t be context relevant anyway.

The Alt Description is used for images, why would you use it on a link? Use Title instead.

So you are saying if I have 10,000 clients websites all backlink to my website with anchor text “web design”, it won’t help with my ranking for “web design” because it’s not contextual?

You can’t put an alt attribute in a <a> tag as it is only allowed in an <img> tag.

The <a> tag already displays text as its default content so why would you want to specify
alternate text for when images are turned off.

Of course it will help your site. And you don’t need to use any tags in <a href…, anchor text is enough.

There is no alt tag in <a href, and title tag is no use regarding SEO, especially if it is same as anchor text.

Well, it seems an Old School idea to get ranked for any particular keywords. Linking to the client website by making use of those tag worked since a year back but now it seems that Google has adopted a technique to bifurcate the link back from client website. In these case better try to reciprocal with those linking website may help you in the campaign.

Use the keyword which are more related to a particular page. For instance my page is related to web design. So i can use <a href=“”>web design</a>.
Thanks,
Off Page SEO

See, Alt tags are for images… Ideally Alt tags should possess the description about the image. Do not try to stuff your keyword in your Alt tag.

Where as anchor text is like making a clickable text referring to some related / relevant web page.

Yes, anchor text are considered as very strong internal links or deep links… they may help in keyword ranking.

Alt tag can be used in images only. Creating text links will definitely help your rankings. Target particular keywords with the exact page will do it for you. Creating text links with the inner page URL, to rank them is the strategy followed by most of the webmasters.

It’ll help to a point but put yourself in Google’s shoes, they see a bunch of links with identical anchor text from non-contextually related sites, how does that look to them? It looks contrived and unlikely and is only going to help your rankings if they decide that you haven’t been spamming backlinks, that they’re genuine and that the phrase itself isn’t very competitive.

On the other hand, my site (hypothetical) has fewer links but the anchor text varies because the links were added to the linking sites by the site owners themselves and they all have their own way of writing english, the links are all from web design sites and the only reason they’d give their own users a way to leave their site and go to mine is because mine is so good and useful. Now how does that look to Google?

There is no such thing as an alt tag in HTML - there are only [b]alt/b]erative image text attributes for specifying the text to display when the image doesn’t.

Of course there is no the alt tag (yes there is the only tag attribute for images) so lets forgot about that. I would like to ask about title attribute (for both anchor and image tags), do they make any sense for Google?

You can place a title attribute on any tag within the body of your page where it makes sense to do so.

Some browsers will display the title text as a tooptip that pops up within the page when the mose goes owner the tag while other browsers will display it in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window.

Where you use title attributes should be based on where you want real people viewing the page to see them. If it makes sense for real people then it makes sense for the search engines. If it doesn’t make sense for real people then the search engines will be trying to detect that so as to disregard it.

Nice quote I have seen in many site they are using links on image but in search engine we can find the alt tags can help search engine ranking.

I think we can go with both a link with a good title

Try turning images off in your browser and check that the page is still meaningful and usable like that - then you will know if you have the alt ATTRIBUTES defined correctly.

I know you posted this in the SEO forum but using alt attributes also helps with screen readers or other solutions for people with visual disabilities.

Alt text means alternative text .We use alt text only for images because search engine spider canot read images.

That’s what the attribute is there for in the first place.

Search engines are like blind people in that neither can see the image and so have to rely on the alt text that describes the image instead.

It’s not there yet, but [fingers crossed] maybe Google will be implementing Google Goggle technology to the image search algorithm to better understand what the image actually is.