Google's Matt Cutts explains ALT attributes for images

Google's Matt Cutts recently posted a video about how to use ALT attributes for images

The ALT attribute provides alternative or substitute text, for use when the image cannot be seen by a visually impaired person or by a search engine.

In both cases they can't see the image so you have to describe it in a way that tells them what the image shows. For example if it's a photo of a Siamese cat than you might use:

<img src="cat.jpg" alt="siamese cat">

This is great for the visually impaired person and also for SEO purposes because the search engine engine has a label to attach to that photo for use in their Image search.

For more information, I'll handover to Matt's video (3min 10sec):

How To Handle Rapid Google Indexing

Last week I was reading Matt Cutts Blog and saw his report that:

The Google crawl/indexing team has continued working hard, and several people have noticed Google's index getting fresher and fresher. Now some documents can show up in minutes instead of hours or days.

The day after that I published a product review on one of my blogs before lunch. After eating I Googled for the product name and was completely blown away to find that my new page was in the top 5 results with the words updated 36 min ago next to it.

Most people are used to waiting several days if not weeks for new pages on their website to appear in search engines and this can lead to complacency about checking spelling, grammar and broken links before publishing a new page.

With Google now indexing some sites literally within minutes the key message to take away is Quality Control. Get someone to read your page text and click through all the links before publishing