Best Practice for ALT tags of flags to interlink multinational site

[lcourse]

For  a partial keyword match domain name what would you recommend as ALT tag to internlink country domains (different CCTLD)?

Option 1) 
DOMAIN.com DOMAIN.de DOMAIN.co.uk

=> I am a bit concerned about this option in terms of potential penalty for keywords in ALT (since partial match domains)

Option 2) 
UK
DE
FR ...

Option 3)
English UK
Deutsch Deutschland
Deutsch Österreich
Francais France

=> concerned here about mixing lots of languages in ALT tags in each page, which may confuse google language detection.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Don't think its a big deal but I think the best alt text would be the language represented by the flag, in the language of the page.

i.e. English site would have alt text to "Translate to Spanish" "Translate to French"

Spanish site would have alt text "Traducir a Ingles" "Traducis a francés"

[ZephSnapp]

Hi Icourse,

I know this was not the question, but my suggestion is that you don't use flags at all.  Have a tab at the top of the page with a drop down menu and allow the user to select their own language.

Unless you are only going to get visits from the countries you list of course.

If I am a US user, I will find it mildly irritating to have to choose the UK flag to get the language I want.  Same if I am a Swiss French speaker.

I actually wrote about this very topic for the Outspoken Media:  http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/make-your-international-visitors-feel-welcome/

[lcourse]

thanks Zeph.

in our case it is not an issue. We actually have flags and localized versions for US, UK and also CAN.

Also for the swiss we have a intuitive flag solution considering french, german and italian version.

[lcourse]

thanks Oleg.

yes, this makes much more sense.