Alt tag matching product titles - e-commerce

[sichristie]

Hey all,

Just wondering if it is ok to match the alt tag to product titles.

Imagine an e-commerce site that lists a whole lot of products on any one page for any one category.

Each product listing has a thumbnail image beside it.

The easiest way to implement this dynamically is to use the product title for the alt tag.

Anyone had any experience with this? Is it overkill / spam of keywords - given that the product title is repeated.

Our current situation is that our alt tags are simply blank or say 'photo' which is no good, and we have hundreds of thousands of pages.

Cheers,

Croozie

[AdoptionHelp]

If a human curator isn't possible (and it doesn't sound feasible for your site) then this is the next best thing. If it makes you nervous you could make the alt tag Photo of %title, but I don't think that is necessary. For example, Amazon uses the title as alt tag too.

[AlanMosley]

you mean a product name for each image, or all images on the page have the same alt text?

either would be better then none, but obviously better if they are unique.

This would not be seen as spam at all. (IMO)

[wildnerakademie]

Just remember, Google doesn't like too long alternative text in images. Take advantage of the following two Firefox Browser add-ons: Senseo (you'll need Firebug first) and KGen. Then check the resulting keyword-density for important keywords. Maybe you'll need to provide a longer product description.

[toeplly]

Alt Tags Must be related to the products, it's just a way to tell search Engine crawlers about image..

I would recommend to use a good sense 3 to 5 words  about images in ALT tags rather than just a keywords..

[sichristie]

Best answer. But at a granular product line level, Amazon use 'product details' for all their products.

Might try replicating each product title with each alt tag on one category - see how it goes.