Image "Alt" tags and SEO?

[The Nikster]

First to Paul, sorry for delay in responding.

I agree with you about 'WHY' image tags are there, and yes they should not be considered an SEO tool. My point was rather one of making sure that the ones that are NOT there (because they are a shape on the website for instance) do not interfere with the SEO already in place by other means i.e. Meta Tags, Meta Description, Keyword density etc, etc.

It remains a tricky question to answer, so for now i think i will just leave my sites as they are. Thanks all for your comments though.

And now to V12CatMan,

In Xara Designer Pro 6 and in fact all the web designer products, when you draw an 'object' for arguments sake a rectangle, it is recognised as an image (.png) when uploaded to your webspace. Now lets say you draw your website from scratch and you have 30 such items making up your webpage, you now have 30 'images' that will not be tagged as they are merely shapes on a webpage. But to Google, you have 30 images without tags, and at the moment at least 'they dont like that', so this thread has been all about whether to do something about naming all the "Shape Images" or not? and it would appear that most agree with my first thoughts of just leaving them be.

As for text, if you are simply writing body text with no effects or what have you, it appears as text with no issues. If however you use the 'shadow' tool on your text, it will automatically be turned into an image by Xara. I have gotten round this in the past by simply creating a copy of the text, making it dark grey or black, adding any feathering etc, then place it behind the original text. this way the original text is still text and the copy behind will either be another version of that text or an image if you have added any effects. either way the original text is intact...

[pauland]

I think the problem of images that aren't relevant to content is universal - lots of people not using Xara software will add images for presentation purposes that aren't content related (brings to mind the old 1-pixel image trick of old). Xara does generally encourage more images to be created - either automatically (as you have pointed out) or for aesthetic reasons - so I don't think Xara generated sites will particularly upset search engines, because plenty of sites not generated by xara have presentational images without alt tags.