I recently was looking over a link we had on another site but I noticed the alt text was different from the anchor text, how is this read by the search engines?

an example is alt text="graphic designer">design</a>

It is difficult to say how it is read by Google, but one way to check this is to go to the page and check the cached version of the page and see what google has indexed. Once you have gone to the indexed or cached version of the page, view the "source code" and I am pretty certain that you will see that Google has indexed. I am pretty certain that you will find that it has been indexed just as you have described. So then, logically I would think that Google has related both the anchor text and alt text to the url that was defined in the ref.

Did I answer your question?

In my opinion, since they are two different terms, I would adjust the alt text to reflect what you had used for the anchor text so that Google knows which text you are relating to which URL for certain. I think that is the best way to go here.

Cade wrote:

In my opinion, since they are two different terms, I would adjust the alt text to reflect what you had used for the anchor text so that Google knows which text you are relating to which URL for certain. I think that is the best way to go here.

I agree with this approach, Cade.

Didn't you guys just post an entire article about the advantages of utilizing alt text on your blog? I would think it would be worthwhile maybe posting that article here for future reference.

shill wrote:
I recently was looking over a link we had on another site but I noticed the alt text was different from the anchor text, how is this read by the search engines?

an example is alt text="graphic designer">design</a>

I have read the replies, and quite honestly I can see where Cade is coming from, but in my experience I think this is a good way for you to relate two search terms with one hyperlink. In other words, I do purposely elaborate my alt text to further describe the keyword that I have linked. I think it is a good way to attract long tail traffic. So, for example, let's use "dog", if I were a dog breeder I might alt text this term "dog breeder" which is definitely related.

I have not been penalized (that I know about) for doing this and I don't know that I would put too much weight into alt text anyway. I think alt text for images is several times more important than it is for backlinks. I wonder if anyone can tell me that they have had success with alt text on backlinks.

I can tell you that we utilize alt text on all of our backlinks. As to whether or not we have seen specific results from this or not, it is difficult to determine because we always diversify our efforts in our SEO Campaigns. We would not just utilize alt text and wait for the results to come in.

I don't know about the rest of the search engine optimization professionals, but we are finding that onsite optimization is less productive than focusing on "offsite" search engine optimization. Did I help answer your question?