Image alt attribute vs. plain text in link?

[cadenzajon]

I'm building a product category browsing page for a high-falutin' jewelry retailer where we display only product photos linking to individual product pages, without any text in the links.

From an SEO and link-juice-passing perspective, is it most effective to embed the product titles as the alt attribute in each image, or to leave alt="" and use text substitutions (i.e. an inner which is css'd to display: none) within the <a>to help search engines accept my product titles as the link text with the most credibility?</a>

[SEMPassion]

I would be very careful about using the display: none route. Hidden text is considered a no no.  If you can't convince the client of the importance of link text then go with the alt tag.  I would also name the image files to reflect the anchor text I would like to use.

[EGOL]

I agree.... I would go to these high-falutin' folks and tell them that a little text on the page is a good thing.

As Chris suggests I would name the images and create alt attributes for appropriate keywords.

[DonnieCooper]

Hey Jonathan,

Chris is right. I strongly recommend:

1. use the alt tag (and don't hide text)

2. use descriptive names for images

3. use text links along with the images

A great example is http://www.etsy.com/category/jewelry
(except they didn't name the images very well)

Does this help?

[cadenzajon]

Can I do:

Engagement Ring

Or will having the alt text and the plain text both in the contents of the same link pollute its keyword focus? Would it be better to do something like:

Engagement Ring

And then 301 or rel=canonical the two PHP targets to the same page? (I understand that if both links point to the same URL, Google will ignore the second one on the page, considering it a duplicate.)

[DonnieCooper]

Great question. I recently worked on a site with exact same layout, and I chose the first one.

I think it's better for users because they won't have to 'think' about which one they should they click. It's also a bit easier to maintain, so you can focus resources elsewhere.

[cadenzajon]

It's interesting to note that Etsy (your example) uses the second option.

What do you think of absolutely positioning the image over the text, so that the text is only visible until obscured by the image as it loads? I don't mind that, and it would allow me to sneak in some decent anchor text past the client's visual look-and-feel regime...

[DonnieCooper]

Nope. Sorry. Google can crawl CSS, so anything you do to hide text (z-index, position:relative, etc) is easily detectable (Google can even parse javascript).

Now, sometimes you can get away with such things, like in a drop down menu for example. But if you do it, be sure to use the standards from a site that is well indexed.

You're right, I was looking at that to... hahaha. From my experience though, It's better to have one link.. maybe not much better, but at least a little bit.

Does this help Jonathan?