keywords in 1px text: bad, but keywords in a small image alt are fine, right?

[paokun]

hi,
i've just thought of this.
writing keywords at the bottom of a page, with a 1px size fonts and white text on a white background is bad and considered like spamming, right?

but

writing keywords in images alt text is good, right?

so, how about putting a white small image over a white background thus being invisible, with a alt text with the keywords will be good, isnt it?
im going to try this:-)

[fulton savage]

As long as you consider "spam" to be synonomous with "fine"

[David Wallace]

Unless an image in hyperlinked to a page, alt attribute text is not going to help you anyway. Also keep in mind that the text should describe the page the image is linking to. And if you are thinking about stuffing a bunch of keywords into an alt attribute, that still constitutes keyword stuffing and really is no different from trying to hide text in small sizes and/or as same color as background.

[phaithful]

paokun, I think you're missing the point of why white on white is bad. Spam is spam... To be honest with you, white on white text is probably just as effective or probably more effective than stuffing an alt tag of a white on white image.

I haven't seen concrete proof that spiders index and parse CSS or javascript files where they could understand that it's white on white, and even if they did there are plenty of ways of obscuring the CSS and javascript that even most humans wouldn't understand it.

Basically what I'm saying is, that white on white text probably won't get detected by a search engine robot, but it sure will be detected by your competitors, especially those who are savvy to SEO tactics. Why take a risk of being banned / delisted simply to have additional keywords on your page.

You're better off spending your time and efforts on building links rather than wasting your time on easily detectable and outdated black hat techniques.

[paokun]

thanks for the advice, so.. well,
if at the bottom of my page i place kind of text menu, about 11 pixel size, black on a white background, with a list of my pages, and for each of these links i place 2-3 keywords as anchor text, now it should be fine, right?

[mcanerin]

It's better, but not necessarily "fine". At least you are not attempting to hide the links. Now it would just look like crap (I'm assuming that we are talking about a lot of pages. If it's just a few - then it would be fine).

Let me put it this way - if you want to do something for a search engine that, in turn, makes you want to hide the result from humans because it looks stupid - it's probably stupid, period.

I think you've been reading some bad advice. Stuffing keywords and links isn't the answer. Keywords and links are a necessary part of the puzzle, but not a magic bullet. If doing that worked, then that's all anyone would be doing, and what all the successful sites would be doing. They are not.

Do keyword research, choose 2-3 keyword phrases per page, and optimize for those. For links, keep them under 50 total on the page. I prefer less than 20, myself, unless it's a directory or something similar.

If you do this, then you will find that your perceived need to trick the search engines and hide the evidence from people isn't necessary, nor is stuffing a page full of links and anchor text. You will just find that you have better looking (and ranking) pages - which is the goal in the first place.

Good luck,

Ian

[paokun]

thanks for the advice.
i've read a lot about seo, one thing i really cannot understand is:
why every page should have at max 2 keyphrases to be optimized. i mean, if those two keyphrases bring be 200 visitors a day, why not adding a third or a fourth one to make the new visitors up to 500 a day? considering that about 5 keyphrases cannot be spamming, why not using some more than two? it's really very weird to me..and i wonder why pages like bonusbetting.it have not been banned for years though if you double click on the footer there are lots of stuffed keyphrases.

i have very high KEI keyphrases, that why i would like to use them as much as possible without spamming of course.

[Marcia]

on the footer there are lots of stuffed keyphrases.That doesn't mean they're ranking for all those phrases.

[mcanerin]

There is a difference between "putting keywords on a page" and "optimizing".

By focusing on a few keywords per page, you are optimizing (or at least, in a position to optimize), by putting in lots of keywords, in many cases you are DE-optimizing and moving off-message.

Ian