Ian — Tue, 02 Nov 1999 22:48:00 +0000

Hi Tiny,
where did you read that "alt" tags increase your ranking with search engines??? To my knowledge a search engine does a couple of things depending on what sort of spider it is.
1) it reads the meta tag information (discription & keywords etc.) and then compares it the informatin on the page and then ranks it according to that relevant information.
2) it reads the whole page and uses that information as keywords for searches.
you will see this when you see your listing on search engines as some will list your site description by your meta description while others will list your description by the first few lines written on your page.
While "alt" tags for images are recognized as being "more correct" in web pages, I really don't think they increase your ranking and I would definatly not have any alt tag of that length on my page.
Concentrate on your meta tags and make sure they relate to the subject of your page. It is reccommended you have no more than 1000 characters for keywords and not to repeat any single word any more than 3 times. I suggest linkexchange's site inspector or web site garage or meta medic which are free services that will perform checks on your page and suggest to you ways of improving your ranking.
I'm sure there are other search spider ways and other tools etc, and maybe someone will join in and share their knowledge on this subject, but in the meantime I hope this helps.

Ian