Is this anchor tag good SEO?

[James]

There's a experienced web designer who is also good at SEO who made tutorial and he always points out in tutorial what is good sea and what is not.
But then he used this code:
<a href="address"><img src="path" alt="keyword where link goes"></a>

And he used that as buttons in a menu to other pages on his site.

I thought this was bad SEO because spiders can't read text embedded in images so all it has is the alt="keywords" but that alt is only a description of what the image is.. or does it understand that since the img is inside the anchor tags that the alt is meant as description of where the link goes?

[Jake]

The image link alt text looks right, although that might be more beneficial for getting the image into image search results.

I believe only text links can have anchor text, the displayed blue underlined text. To avoid being flagged for SEO spam, mix up the anchor text in external backlinks, with no anchor text in a fair percentage of them, adding words and changing the keywords in the other links. Reports have suggested the Anchor text in your own menu system may have the most SEO effect.

[Doodled]

You're right in some ways but it has to be done right. It's better to make a background graphic and then lay the anchor text on top. That way it looks like a button but you still get your anchor text.

In menu situations you should format the menu using the ul and li HTML otherwise they look, to search engines, like strings of anchor text and a bit spammy.

Have a look at the code for the menu system on http://howtoseo.link2light.com/. All the formatiing is done in external files while the code just uses lists within lists.

As a last result if you have to use a graphic then it should be <a href="" title="text you want"> but that is the weakest form of SEO. If your web designer was 'good at SEO' he would know all the above...

[Isabelle]

Yes this is pretty helpful thing in SEO, People should approach Anchor tag in SEO for better optimization techniques.

[DK]

It is advisable to describe the image with keyword in alt tag.
let suppose there is a image of black berry curve phone, so in this case we can describe the image in the alt tag with following "black berry curve phone" or "black berry phone" or "black berry curve" ("mobile phone" remember this will not be specific)

Remember Search Engine have hundreds of metrics to measure the relevancy of the search keyword to the webpage
For one specific keyword there might be million of relevant webpage but Google show only 10 in there first page by this you can understand how there algo are smart enough to find the relevant page.

In some case where the image doesn't describe any physical object (i;e some mark, navigation, etc) in that case you can use <a href="address"><img src="path" alt="keyword where link goes"></a>

So the whole point is make the page relevant to your keyword which you want to focus.

For more information you can contact me at dushyant.verma@outlook.com

[sachin s]

Very basic thing title tag in image is missing, moreover in anchor tag alt can be given.

[Jack]

Yes that's fine, but if you really want to be html valid aswell, add the width, height and title elements also.

[Husein Yuseinov]

In some cases that would work better than the text anchor, especially if it's sitewide link.

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[Sonika Mishra]

Yes, you are right.