Image Alt Tags Still Passing Link Juice

November 10th, 2007 · No Comments

In case anyone had doubted the power of an image link with an alt tag passing juice, here is an excellent example. My friends at timeforcake creative media, a Frisco Colorado Web Design Firm, were wondering why Full Frame Design was ranking for the search ‘frisco colorado web design‘. Full Frame does not have the word Frisco anywhere on their site. A quick look at their back links showed no obvious use of the term ‘Frisco’ in the anchor text, in fact most links were images. Using Jim Boykins’ Neat-o tool, we found that the alt text of these image links did use ‘Frisco’ quite a bit! Hence the rankings for Full Frame on this query.

The lesson here is that not only that alt text can still pass juice on an image link, but you should consistently vary the anchor text and types of links while doing link building to maintain a more ‘natural’ looking link profile. I am off to make sure any image links pointing to my clients are using some type of anchor text!