Help with ALT tags please

[Vision]

Im in the process of putting together a new homepage on my ecommerce website, up until now i have been using a preset product catagory as the home page but never been happy with that.

So i have started putting the page together, i have a picture of the item, then a title underneath it and under that the price and a "View and Buy" button, the image, title and button are all links to the items product page.

Would i be best having the ALT Tags and title of the image the same as the product title?

What about the "View and Buy" button, should the ALT tags on this be something like "View and Buy this xxxxxxx"?

Thanks in advance

Mark

[OldWelshGuy]

With regard the buy now button, If the image is the same then the alt tag should be the same. If you call the same image yet give it different alt tags, that is a sure fire way to get google toflag your site as a potential spamming site, and possibly get scored down with google trustrank.

With regard the images, you should describe the image, if it is aa shift dress, then describe the image as 'Red Shift Dress worn by young blonde model' then stick with that every time the image appears.

[Vision]

Cool, so a better title and ALT for the buttons would be just "View and Buy" everytime the button is on the page?

Thanks for that

[seo next]

You can have the image Alt tag as name of image + a keyword you want to target for the page

For buy now buttons i would suggest to have no follow tags and image alt tags as Buy Product + keyword

[OldWelshGuy]

Cool, so a better title and ALT for the buttons would be just "View and Buy" everytime the button is on the page?

Thanks for that


If you are targeting the word 'buy' in your phrases, such as 'buy blue widgets' then having the word 'buy' in anchor text of linked images will help your rankings for those action phrases.

[bdw]

As I undersand it the alt attribute
...is not supposed to literally describe contents of the image. It's supposed to be an alternative for the image, usually stating its purpose. For example image of a warning sign should not have alt text "a triangle with yellow background, black border and exclamation mark", but simply "Warning!". (Wikipedia)

This means that there are several valid cases where the same image could have different alt attributes. In the example above the same image could legitimately be tagged "warning about something", "warning about something else" and "warning about yet another thing".