ALT Tags According To Google's Matt Cutts

I had been doing a lot of research about how to properly tag images since the summer when I read an article in Digital Web about Google Universal Search. There was suprisingly little information available at the time, considering how big social photo sites like Flickr have become.

Finally, Google is speaking vis a vis Matt Cutts -- head of Google's webspam team. In Cutt's ALT tag video he talks about how you can use ALT tags to tell Google more about what is in an image file and boost it's page ranking.

Here are some highlights:

1. Including ALT text with your images will help Google to better identify its contents



2. ALT tags do not need to be long. Cutts' tag was 7 words. Even 25 is too much.



3. An ALT tag used in conjuction with a descriptive filename (cat.jpg versus ds134.jpg, for example) will improve the searchability of your images even more