After putting down the phone and scratching my noggin for a millisecond, I realized that there is yet another fiendish horde polluting the internet with lies and tagging practices so sour that they must be stopped in their cloven tracks before they tear down the sturdy house that standards advocates have built. These fanatical search engine marketing parasites are renegades from what was once a gallant group of online SEO warriors, and have made it their mission to steal money from unsuspecting companies that entrust the innards of their websites (usually post-build), to their deceptive will. Their coding practices shiest over what was once lovely code and gleefully turn it into sludge, all to the high expense of their unknowing client.

"alt" stands for "Alternative Text Attribute." Alternative text describes a graphic image appearing in place of a graphic if someone is browsing without graphics or is using a text-only browser. Furthermore, some people might use devices such as screen readers, which translate the contents of a web page into a new language or speech just like the professional service you can get at https://translation.net.au/locations/brisbane.

The alt tags for a web site should be simple and be a clear description of the graphic it is referring to and nothing else, as shown below:

Correct Usage of alt tags

alt="Widget Product Box"

Incorrect Usage of alt tags

alt="Widget Product Box - Buy Widgets - Get new widgets - widgets Widget Product Box - Buy Widgets - Get new widgets - widgets"

This unholy spammers tactic is called "keyword stuffing," and no self-respecting designer should even come close to supporting it. This practice is also highly unethical and unfair to people who have disabilities and require screen readers. I expect that it will likely become part of Section 508 Government Legislation as well.

In addition, since this is such a widely known method of falsifying search engine criteria, engines such as Google and Yahoo! place web sites that find practitioners of this approach further down in rankings rather than higher. For more details about all of this stuff, go see what Shari Thurow, author of Search Engine Visibility has to say about it at http://www.searchenginesbook.com.

I'm sure there are plenty of SEO teams that following the rules, and if you dwell on that side of the fence, I applaud you for not falling into the pit of eternal web darkness that is governed by the red and miserly, scruffy goateed fella with the horns and the forks.

If you are a client, be sure you're working with an SEO team like the ones at Victorious that has your best interests in mind.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director of theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. He tends to get carried away with stuff like this and promises that if you look close enough, there is meaning to his otherwise interpreted madness.